


Minuet

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drug Addiction, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HIV/AIDS, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Punk, Recreational Drug Use, Seattle, Werewolves, Wizard Rock, Wizarding Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 14:35:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14427546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Twenty-four hours in Seattle, WA, U.S.A., October 1990."Grief had no shape. Almost no name. Almost no feeling. Just was. Like a black box with no edges."





	Minuet

**Author's Note:**

> NB: some pieces of this story may make more sense to you if you have read the preceding story in this series, [the girls, part ii](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11009301). 
> 
> i also must warn you that i am extremely serious about the "drug addiction," "referenced suicide," and "grief/mourning" tags. all of these elements play major thematic parts throughout the story. if these are triggering elements for you, or if you are looking from an escape from the real world, this might not be the story for you. 
> 
> please let me know if i should tag or warn for anything else i've left out.

I’ll take you, you, you, and I from the Pacific Northwest: a haunted land where nature dances the minuet with people and danced with me in those old bygone days. 

I brought everything I knew from there to California: years and years of a different life to which I can never return nor want to and seems at times almost to have occurred to another body somehow vaguely in my shape and recognition.

— Richard Brautigan, “The Gathering of a Californian”

\---

\--

-

_Smoke and Mirrors_ Wizarding Weekly  
New Bands Report, September 24, 1988

Seattle’s most astonishing new band is Crucia, who rushed out the gate with an eardrum-melting punch to the solar plexus at the Den last Friday. They boast a heavy, fuzzy growl like the best local bands on the Muggle and magical scenes now, but the songs never go quite where you'd expect — it’s like the sharp splintering edges of Sonic Youth plus the intricacy of Wipers, J Mascis’ riffs, MBV’s hallucinatory blankets of noise… And keep in mind this was their first show. The lineup includes a few familiar faces: Alex Robinson, late of Kelpies, has brought her ferocious voice and fierce, indicting lyrics to the table, but she’s given up guitar duties to Wray Thorne, who you might remember from crouching on the floor playing tapes in Warlike Warlock, and Graeme Sugarbush, who is entirely unassuming until he plugs in and the earth shakes. Like Graeme, unshakeable jazz-taught drummer Marsden Cox has never been in a rock band before. Everything’s rounded out by Mercedes Santos, sometime Kelpies bassist, still making Alex’s songs sound good on the low end. We caught up with the fivesome, three of whom live together close by, at their go-to coffee shop at Roy and Broadway on Capitol Hill. They all drink cold brew, black. 

WRAY: In school, Graeme and I always talked about music that sounds like here. When I first met Alex she was talking about that too. So then I had to get her to break up her band to do something about it with me. 

ALEX: That’s a gross oversimplification. 

WRAY: The real story is too long and complicated for the New Bands pages but rest assured you’ll hear it when we’re extremely famous. 

S&M: Tell me about getting the rest of the band together, then. 

WRAY: Well, Graeme is the best guitarist that I know — 

GRAEME: Oh my god, stop. 

ALEX: He says this every time anyone says something nice about his playing. 

WRAY: Mercedes is the best bassist, Marsden the best drummer —

GRAEME: Before us, Marsden played in the Denny Academy jazz band, which is why they’re so fucking good. 

MERCEDES: The biggest challenges of being in this band are keeping up with Marsden and playing louder than Graeme. 

[ _The entire band laughs._ ] 

S&M: What about writing the songs? They’re so complex — like no other band in Seattle right now. That had to have been a challenge too. 

WRAY: Not as hard as keeping up with Marsden. 

MARSDEN: The songs just happened. They sort of move out of Alex and through Wray and then the rest of us mess them up. 

ALEX: They’re half-formed before they all touch them. They need all of us to get there. And if one of us — if we had one member different it wouldn’t sound the same. It’s an expression of all of us, from the heart, the hearts of us. This is a message from the five of us to the world. 

\---

\--

-

Seattle Washington USA  
October 1990

I. 

In the city which was above the sound, and under another sound, and containing another sound, the summer had long since ended and it had begun to rain, and it would rain now every day and night until May. There were few deciduous trees to lose their leaves in the growing chill. Everything just turned grey — the sky, the sea, the distant hills and the lakes in the valleys, concrete, clothing, skin — and the green grew sharper. There were no more blackberries or lavender flowers and the concert flyers wallpapering every telephone pole on Capitol Hill turned sodden and the ink liquified and ran to stain the sidewalk in great spilling violet-black pools. The mountains, which were visible in the summer to the east and the west, to the south, and occasionally (from certain bends in certain roads at the tops of certain hills) to the north, slipped behind a thick white veil where they could not be seen except for sometimes at dawn.

In the city everything turned silent except for the rain and the sound underground, which was almost but not quite the sound of the secret subterranean fault slipping, and which was close enough to the sound of the rain. Occasionally the veil from the mountains came closer and moved through town, in the buildings and the hills and the steep avenues, opaque and soft as fabric, and sometimes other things fell behind it.

\--

After a while Alex came in to wake him up, not that he was really sleeping. At first he thought her touch was a dream. She rubbed his back for a few minutes and didn't say anything and it seemed she didn't want to. Eventually she said, "We should probably get going." Then he remembered why he had been sleeping in Wray's bed. 

The memory kept circling back on him and every time it was a new blow right in the wound of the last one. The letter was on the bedside table still and the thin pages fluttering a little in the breeze through the cracked window around the overgrown bamboo plant outside. 

Alex looked beautiful. She was wearing a lovely sleeveless black dress and a black lace shawl and she had done something to her hair. “Where’s your suit,” she asked Graeme. 

“Was going to — ”

To wear one of Wray’s, he was going to say, or trying to say; it didn’t / wouldn’t happen, though he was thinking it, and holding the thought in the place where thoughts usually came out in the form of words. He looked desperately to Alex and when she realized what he had been about to say her eyes grew a few sizes and she looked down at the floor. 

“Do you have one at your parents’ house?”

He did; he had worn it to his uncle’s funeral, which was the last one he had attended. He had also worn it to Wray’s mom’s funeral. Wray had a handful of suits which were all purchased at Goodwill and ill-fitting. He had worn them onstage sometimes when he was in Warlike Warlock and when Crucia played at the VFW Hall in Beacon Hill. They were hanging in the closet. “I want to wear one of his,” he told Alex. 

“Alright,” she said. She went to Wray’s closet and pulled aside the curtain. When he sat up to watch her he felt like his heart was falling inside him. For a couple days there had been this sort of shaking wringing shivering in his chest, like the last throes of a bad hangover. “Which one do you want?”

“I should wear something black right?”

She snorted a little in laughter then looked like she regretted it. “It’s customary to wear black at a funeral.”

“Not in every culture.” 

“But in ours. What about the lapels.” She was filtering through the closet with her back to him but he could hear the sound of her tears in her voice. “Do you want the one with those huge stupid lapels.” 

“Yeah, that one.” 

She found it and laid it on the bed at his feet and they both looked at it for a while. The huge lapels were indeed extremely ridiculous and one of them was fraying. The satin was bright and soft against the rest of the matte fabric. Beneath the left one Wray had stuck a few pins, also from Goodwill, and from shows — strange animals with jeweled eyes and band logos oxidizing a bloody red stain from having been worn in the omnipresent rain. Alex said, “Graeme, however you need to — ”

“You can read the letter.” 

She looked at him with extreme regret. “Are you sure.”

“Yeah. Here.” He grabbed it off the side table and shook it in her general direction. “You can read it now.”

“Graeme — ”

“Alex, please, I can’t — it’s just me holding it right now, and I can’t, not by myself for very much longer.” 

She took it and sat at his feet on the bed and unfolded it. Her hands were trembling in the thin paper. Graeme got up moving very slowly in extreme pain which was not physical and yet the only thing he could feel and the only thing he could ever remember having felt. He found his black flannel shirt on the floor half under the bed and tried to magic it to smell better but nothing worked. He put it on anyway and then Wray’s suit, over the t-shirt and underwear he had been wearing in bed for days. He sat down beside Alex to take the pins out of the lapel. She had got to the end of the letter: 

_I’m with you all the time. I’ll be in the music with you all the time. I love you —_

Alex closed the letter and balanced it on her knees and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and he watched her face twist and contort for just a moment. He had only seen her cry a little just as she had only seen him cry a little but he did not doubt she, as he, had had her chest beating wail of it, or she would, or it was coming; perhaps she was waiting until after the funeral. It would be like Alex to take the time for herself only after everything else had been squared away. After a moment she collected herself and then she gave the letter back to Graeme. 

“It’s a lot to swallow,” he said. 

“Yes,” she told him. She was looking around at the room as though there might be clues in Wray’s sparse decoration. “I suspected.” 

“How did you — ”

“He told me had fibrometriosis,” she said. “That’s not a thing. Not to mention we couldn’t play shows one day a month on a pretty reliable twenty-eight day schedule and I was pretty confident neither of you were menstruating.” 

“I guess you’re right.” 

“We had to turn down that gig with the Weird Sisters… that was when I knew for sure.” 

“That was a mutual decision because none of us can stand them.” 

“Yes, but Wray started it with the most vitriol even though he owns all four of their albums.” 

She stopped there. They were both thinking about her use of the present tense. _He owns_. Because he no longer owned anything they were going to have to figure out what to do with all his things. This was a dimension of the problem which they had not yet considered. The records and the books, the suits, posters, antique ashtrays, videocassettes, maps, his bedding and pots and pans, his strange nut flours and obscure condiments, his furniture, his bed, his room. 

“We couldn’t tell you,” Graeme told Alex, “we couldn’t tell anyone, like the only reason I knew about it is because I was there.” 

“You were?” 

“Yeah, it was at the Den. Terrormancy opened for — I forget. Some hardcore band from Vancouver who we didn’t see because — ” 

They ran out into the rain together Wray shoving him from behind by the shoulders and they ran down the street and up the Denny bridge over I-5 and when the wind moved the clouds and the full moon slipped out from the thick navy-grey blanket Wray just crumpled and fell to the wet sidewalk. 

“We went to the hospital,” Graeme went on, “and they told me you can be his legal witness or otherwise it would be a caseworker. A stranger.” 

“How old were you guys?” 

“Fifteen.” They had both, entirely independently of one another, told the requisite nurses who asked that they were seventeen, which was old enough by American wizarding standards to claim a right to privacy even to one’s parents regarding blood and transformation statuses. Additionally it was old enough to serve as a witness, which was a fancy word for the-only-other-person-allowed-to-know. “I guess you can tell anybody now. They’ll’ve found out in the — ” 

He couldn’t say _autopsy_. “How’s that,” Alex said. 

“There’s one or two extra bones and things, in the hands, they explained it… And his knees, the caseworker called it lycanthropic arthritis…” 

He would go to meet Wray on the morning after the full moon outside the Werewolf Registry at Seventh and Weller in Chinatown. No one else waited there with any regularity so usually he was alone watching the sun come up and the dockworkers heading down the steep sharp hills toward the shore of the Sound. The fog moving over the city so poetically sometimes he watched it and it made him think of music. Music which unfolded against the low blunt buildings and the hills. The way the city flowed like music down from the mountains and into the sea. He reached into the earth and tried to feel. Sometimes he felt he was throwing himself against a wall over and over expecting it to give. Eventually Wray came out and they walked up the hill together toward the 24-hour diner on Capitol Hill stopping every now and then so Wray could crack his knees. They would order pancakes and eggs and bacon and shots of bottom-shelf whiskey and Bloody Marys. “It gets worse every time,” Wray said. He was bending his knee back and forth under the table with his hand over the cap of it as though he might feel whatever loose sharp thing in there was torturing him, and occasionally the toe of his boot brushed Graeme’s leg. 

“There has to be something to fix it.” 

“Yeah, well, heroin, or unicorn blood, apparently…” 

There was a hair-thin laceration at his temple and blood flaking in his dishwater hair. They went back to the house and Alex was awake on the porch with a cigarette, in her bathrobe, looking like Kim Gordon as an ingenue of the Silents. “Wray got in a fight,” Graeme told her. He had gotten to be very creative with excuses. 

“At six AM?” 

“You’d be surprised…” 

They went inside and Alex made more Bloody Marys and Wray closed the wound at his forehead with Muggle butterfly bandages in the stained bathroom mirror. 

Perhaps by then she had already suspected. “It was Montclair,” she said, picking the skin around her thumbnail. Not really a question. 

“Yeah.” 

“Explains a lot.” 

All he could really do was nod tightly. No one had said Montclair’s name since it had happened. The police had confirmed death by suicide. It had been pretty obvious when Alex had told them about the note, and then they had compared it with the handwriting in the little journal Wray carried in his coat to write down lyrics. They had been sitting together on very uncomfortable chairs in the basement of the police station. Alex was holding Graeme's hand so tightly that her fingers were white and so were his. A friendly woman detective came over to ask them, had your friend ever exhibited signs of suicidal depression, had ever he abused drugs before… 

The most shocking thing was that they used _had_. It was circling in Graeme’s head like sharks after blood. 

What’s the kind of murder, he had been thinking then, was still thinking, what’s the kind of murder when you do something terrible to someone and then keep chipping away piece by piece at their will to live for five years until they die? That must qualify as some variety of murder. Fourth degree murder? 

“Graeme,” Alex tried, very carefully, “when he — ”

He stood up so quickly his head spun. Alex’s mascara had smeared a little in the corner of her eye, unslept red and black as a bruise. “We should probably get going,” Graeme told her.

\--

They met in the library at Denny Academy, the Northwest’s oldest — and only public — school of magic. Graeme was reading the latest issue of the school subscription to _Total Magical Melody_ , because he had found his dad’s old electric guitar in the garage on his last trip home to Peshastin and had shrunk it to the size of a coin to smuggle it back to school with him. Wray came over to ask if he could read it after. Graeme was very shy; he was only twelve. When he was finished he brought the magazine over to Wray who was alone at a corner table reading _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_. He just handed over the magazine and practically ran away. When the next issue of _TMM_ came in Graeme got to the library to find Wray was already reading it. After that they read it together. Wray lived in Issaquah where his dad, who was a Muggle, was a cop. There were usually holes in his jeans. He had read a lot and his mom who had once been a hippie had gotten him into Television, X, Big Star, the Slits, the Temptations, Buffalo Springfield — CBGBs, Motown, Haight-Ashbury. Graeme liked Joni Mitchell and the Talking Heads and poetry by Richard Brautigan. They traded books and tapes. They went together to the record store on Capitol Hill and pooled their Muggle change to buy the last remaining copy of Mission of Burma’s _Signals, Calls, and Marches_. When they got outside and around the corner Wray showed him that he’d shoved a cassette of Flipper’s _Generic_ in the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt on the way out. 

Graeme’s parents were out in Peshastin still operating the last running Sugarbush Wandwood factory, so he boarded at Denny in a tiny little room with a bed and desk and a view of Lake Washington, ate breakfast and dinner in the dining hall alone, did his homework, played guitar. He went with Wray went to see Mission of Burma at a bar in Queen Anne, which they snuck into through the back door. There were some older kids from their school there and they bought Graeme and Wray beers and gave them a flyer for a show happening the following week at a punkhouse in the University District, which was headlined by a local band called the U-Men. It cost $5 to get into and by this point Graeme was getting no allowance due to Sugarbush Wandwood’s near-bankruptcy so Wray saved his lunch money by not eating. The band was like an unholy melange of the Birthday Party and Black Flag. The singer stalked all over the stage in a grey suit contorting as if possessed. When they left the show, stumbling out of the thick sweaty darkness into the cool night, or rather by that point it was the early morning, it felt like waking up inside a different world. 

Wray’s mother died in 1984. He listened to a lot of Bad Brains and threw himself into learning guitar. They started going to see Seattle’s wizarding bands, who played in the same kind of literally underground fire-trap establishments the Muggle bands played in, except with less risk of blowing the entire block’s power. They went to shows at the warehouse behind the gas station on Pike, at Alki Gallery, Skookum House, and at the Den, where there lived and played a hardcore band called Terrormancy. Terrormancy was fronted by a lumberjack-looking guy who everyone wanted to be and no one wanted to talk to. His name was Bill Montclair. 

Some weekends one or both of Graeme's parents would come out and they would go to the aquarium or to the art museums downtown, or they would have ice cream in Volunteer Park and Graeme would show them some of the magic he had been learning, but on every visit they always looked older and more tired, and at last, shortly after Wray's mom passed, they told Graeme the factory was closing at the end of the year. They had made some money off the sale of the land and the house in Peshastin where he had grown up. He had not even known they had put it on the market. The land and the house and the last factory had been in the Sugarbush family since Oregon Trail days. 

They bought a low dismal ranch house full of silverfish in Madrona and Graeme went to live with them again. They were both up odd hours in the Floo trying to sell the final five-hundred Sugarbush wands that had been manufactured, which was increasingly difficult due to crackdowns on wandmaking by the American Magical Congress, then newly controlled by the Sanguicrat party. At last the crates disappeared from the garage. His parents never told him where they had gone. They gave him what they said was the last Sugarbush wand ever made — Douglas fir with a highly unstable core made of the baleen of the only known magical whale species, the Warlocks Gray Whale — for his fifteenth birthday in January 1985. By then already he was doing most of his magic without a wand, because he was frustrated by the limited ability of the short, blunt, standard-issue stick he had been given upon his enrollment at Denny, and besides most of the magic he was doing in his spare time was on his guitar, with the instrument itself serving as a sort of channel for magic into sound. He started three fires and nearly blew the roof off the ranch with the new wand before he got used to it. The trick was control — a control which surpassed words. A control of the entire compendium of one’s thoughts and intent, at which Graeme had never necessarily been very adept. Then at the beginning of February they were at the Den, and it was the night of the full moon. Graeme was drunk, as was pretty customary by this point, due to the perpetual presence at these events of cases of Rainier offered to teenagers without reservation, and he had been talking dizzily to a girl from school he was mildly in love with, but then she had left, and he had gone to look for Wray, who had appeared suddenly running out of the darkness like a spectre out of nightmare and shoved him toward the stairs. 

By this time he had woken up into so many different worlds another one really didn't surprise him too much. At St. Rodericks’ Wizarding Hospital on First Hill the nurse brought him back behind the curtain to Wray’s bedside at dawn. “Don’t say anything,” Wray instructed him. There was a bag of blood and another bag of clear stuff above his head dripping through a cord into his arm. Graeme had been thinking _I told you so_ since — 

“Who?”

“Montclair.” 

— but he pressed his index finger over his lips. 

“They did an AIDS test and it's clean,” said Wray, turning his head on the pillow, “so at least — ” 

“It’s going to be okay,” Graeme said. 

“Is it.” 

“Yeah, it’s going to be okay.” 

He made a spell in his hand for calm. The nurse had used several on him in the waiting room earlier, and then he had signed a bunch of paperwork he still didn’t really understand. He touched Wray’s shoulder. “Fuck you,” said Wray, “I _am_ calm.” 

“Plenty of people live rich and full — ” 

“Graeme… not now, okay?” He sat up a little in the big white bed. When the blankets folded down the bandage was visible, taped against his ribs, inside the paper hospital gown. Because the wounds were cursed and magic would not fully stop the bleeding vivid red stains had seeped through the paper and the antiseptic fabric in a constellated pattern. Like evil stars. Wray reached inside the gown and hovered his hand over the wound. “It didn’t even — it wasn’t so deep. Because I got away. But they said it only has to break the skin. And I felt — Graeme, I felt the moon when it touched me.” 

“What did it feel like?” 

“Like the light got underneath and started opening up…” 

He folded his knees up in the bed and rested his forehead against them. Eventually he turned his face away from Graeme as though it weren’t obvious he was trying to keep from crying. 

Graeme stood up and took his shoes and coat off. “Scoot over,” he said. 

“What?” 

“Scoot!” 

He had to maneuver very carefully with Wray like a funny dance to lie down next to him in the hospital bed without pulling on the dripping cords. “Be careful,” Wray whispered. 

“I am being careful.” 

“I mean with me — around me from now on.” 

The nurse had explained to him that lycanthropy was only transmittable through a subcutaneous bite in the transformed state. It could not even be caught through a blood transfusion from a werewolf, not that such a thing were legal, owing to federal regulations called for by high rates of HIV infection among werewolf communities. Among other viral infections, HIV was transmittable through the bite. 

“You won’t hurt me,” Graeme told Wray. 

“How do you know?”

“I just know.” 

Wray searched his face to see if he was lying, which he wasn’t. “Okay,” he said. 

“I told the nurse I would help you. I’ve got all your paperwork and everything in my backpack.” 

“God, there’s _paperwork_?” 

“I’m gonna take care of it.” 

They left the hospital around noon and took the bus up to Graeme’s parents’ house in Madrona. Since the factory had gone under and they’d parted with the last wands they had both found soul-crushing employment — Graeme’s dad as a typist at a magical law firm, and his mother, who was screamingly depressed after the loss of her family business, as a managing inspector at the processing plant in Redmond that made the standard-issue school wands — and as such they weren’t around. “Go back to sleep,” Graeme told Wray, “or you can play my guitar but if my parents come home, hide.” 

He went out and got on the bus again down to the Werewolf Registry in Chinatown, where he filed Wray’s paperwork. Then he went to Denny — creeping through the halls to avoid being spotted by his teachers — and knocked on the door of the school nurse’s office until she answered. 

“Truant, Sugarbush,” she told him. This meant she would have sent an owl to both his parents at work. He made a mental note to make up an excuse on the bus home. 

“I have a note,” he told the nurse. 

“It had better be a good one.” 

He passed over the folder from the hospital. As she read it her eyebrows cocked progressively higher on her forehead. The first thing she said was, “You’re too young to be a legal witness.” 

“They didn’t say that at St. Rod’s.” 

This was how he learned to stand his ground. They also said it at the Werewolf Registry when he brought Wray to the supervised transformation cells there on the first full moon, in mid-March. Then they told him he wasn’t allowed inside. 

“I came in to file — ”

“It’s different. It’s quarantined on the full moon night. You’ll have to wait outside.” 

Wray hadn’t spoken all day because he was so terrified. He looked desperately to Graeme as though he was the only thing standing between Wray and the plinth where he’d be bloodily sacrificed to vengeful gods. 

“Are you sure there’s no way?” 

“It’s not up to us,” said the technician at the door. “These orders come down from the Beast and Being Accords of 1863.” 

Graeme had recently studied these laws in his American Magical History course and opened his mouth to make an argument for their bigotry and irrelevance, but then Bill Montclair shoved past them in the door. He was wearing a leather jacket with a Void patch sewn crookedly on the back and his long scraggly hair was wet from the rain. He gave Graeme and Wray a bored wink and Wray literally bristled; the fine pale hair on his arms stood up. Then he disappeared down the stairs. In his wake, which smelled like old booze and weed smoke and blood, was an uncomfortable sea change. 

Graeme cleared his throat. “As I was saying — ”

“It’s fine,” Wray said, voice raw. “It’s fine. I can do it.” 

“Are you — ”

“Yes.” Wray searched his face again. The eyes were different. They were a little yellowish around the pupil and most of the fear was gone. It had left behind it a kind of scorched-earth determination. He grasped Graeme’s forearm tightly like a doomed soldier bidding adieu. “See you tomorrow,” he said. 

“See you tomorrow.” 

Wray signed in with the technician. His hand was shaking on the quill. Then he too disappeared down the stairs into the brightly-lit institutional basement where every other registered Seattle werewolf awaited lunar judgement in a few long hallways’ worth of padded white cells. 

Graeme knew already there would be no sleeping. He went outside into the cool wet night and walked toward the I-5 overpass. There was a sake bar on Eighth and Lane that didn’t check ID and which was probably open until 2am. After that he was sure he could find something to do to kill time until dawn, which the nautical charts he’d consulted in the library said was at 6:42am. He waited at the corner for a while, and eventually he sat down, watching up at the sky, until at last a bleeding brilliant edge of the moon emerged from the thick gray bank of clouds. 

It's happening right now, he thought. He was almost surprised he himself didn’t feel any phantom pain. When the clouds moved over again he went up to the sake bar and sat in the back corner and got drunk. To his immense chagrin he found himself thinking of Montclair, and his fucking Void back patch when everyone knew the Faith side of that split was better. And yet it was Montclair’s arrival that had galvanized Wray to face this nightmare alone. 

It was Graeme’s first inkling of the lengths to which Wray would go for vengeance, and of the indiscriminate forms that such vengeance could take, as long as it worked.

\--

The funeral was in Bellevue, where Wray’s father lived. There was a wake at a seedy funeral home and then a burial in an overfull-seeming cemetery on Lake Sammamish and then another gathering. The party seemed to lose members at every move so that by the time they got to the final gathering, which was at Wray’s dad’s Elks Club, it was just the surviving members of Crucia, Wray’s ex Clara and the drummer, Kevin, from her band Presto, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Ross and Giles of Wray’s first band Warlike Warlock), and Wray’s dad and all the old aunts and uncles, who had started talking about who was taking what winter weekends at the Thorne family hunting lodge out in the Cascades on the way to Stevens Pass. 

Just about everyone under thirty excepting some of Wray’s Muggle cousins had gathered at two plastic folding tables with a circulating bottle of extremely bad gin Ross had got at the liquor store across the street and Disillusioned from prying eyes. Graeme was thinking about the casket, which had been closed. He had wanted to stay in the cemetery to watch them fill in the hole but it was raining and everyone was leaving. Anyway certainly by now the grave was closed and they were putting sod over it. There wasn’t a stone yet because it was at the engraver’s being updated with Wray’s date of death and some Bible quote that Mr. Thorne had read during his brief eulogy. Wray’s name and birthday had already been on the stone because they had bought it when his mother died. Alex passed him the gin. People kept touching him and then moving their touch away when he didn’t respond to it. Sometimes he didn’t think he felt it until it was gone. 

He is underground now, he was thinking and then it started to loop in his head the way they’d done with Mercedes’ bass on “Cupio Dissolvi.” He is underground now under ground now under ground now he is underground now he is underground he is underground now… 

Time was moving. They were all talking about something in the pre-drunken way that meant it would become astronomical in imaginative proportions and then never happen. A memorial benefit show. “We can do it at the warehouse on Pike,” Clara said. “We’ll open.” 

“I don’t know that we could play,” Alex said flatly. Graeme’s heart did something so horrible he almost made a pained sound aloud. A week ago they could definitely have played anything, anywhere, at any time, unless it was the full moon. 

Giles piped up. “I think — give me a week. I could learn his — ” 

“No,” Graeme said. Everyone looked at him. He couldn’t remember if he had said anything else since they had arrived at the funeral home for the wake. Maybe he had voiced to Ross his preference for gin. “I mean, thanks but no thanks, Giles.” 

Wray had always said about Giles that he hardly said anything except the wrong thing at the wrong time. When Alex passed Graeme the gin again he took an inadvisably sized swig. 

“It’s alright,” Clara countered gently. “You guys shouldn’t play. Maybe we’ll all do covers.” 

Graeme took the gin bottle back from Marsden to his left and took a still-bigger swig. 

“It could just be a lineup of the bands he liked,” said Alex diplomatically. “Maybe we could do some Kelpies songs.” 

“Jesus,” said Mercedes, “Liz would never go for it.” 

“We could do an acoustic set,” said Alex. But then she had to take the gin from Graeme. 

“We’ll think about it,” said Clara. She reached across the table to rest her hand on Marsden’s shoulder. “You guys shouldn’t worry about it, about anything, like at all.” 

Done and done, Graeme didn’t say. Across the room he heard the telltale raucous peal of Wray’s father’s laugh, which was very unlike Wray’s laugh, which made almost no sound at all, which was just a shaking… 

He folded his arms on the table and put his head down. Behind his eyes in the darkness things were moving. 

A few days previous, Wray’s dad had called them up at the house and asked to speak to Graeme and when he managed to get out of bed and get to the phone had told him that he was welcome to say something if he wanted to. It was the most Wray’s dad had ever said to him in one sitting before, because it was pretty apparent he thought Graeme was a bad influence and his parents were criminals. He had rather expected to be chewed out at the funeral or pelted with rotten vegetables or run over with a mud-caked Jeep Wrangler by the Thorne bereaved. “Alright,” he said, “maybe.” 

“Is that an alright or a maybe?” said Wray’s dad. 

“It’s an I’ll try.” 

“Fine — that’s just fine, Graeme, thank you.” 

Indeed he had tried. He had managed to sit up in bed and write some things down on a paper towel, which was the first thing he could grab in the kitchen without having to talk to anybody. 

_Wray is my dearest friend. We met in the library at Denny Academy when we were twelve years old._

He wrote down some other things and crossed them out. He wrote some lyrics from “Tugboat” by Galaxie 500 and crossed them out too. Then he wrapped it up: 

_I am legally prohibited from saying anything further._

_I tried as hard as I could and am so sorry to all of you._

This was in the front breast pocket of the suit with the pocket square, which was really just a torn silk ladies’ handkerchief from Goodwill that Wray had shoved in there. At the ceremony after reading his own eulogy, which had been brief and to the point, and which hadn’t included many meaningful details of Wray’s personality past age thirteen, because Wray’s father hadn’t really known it, which of course was in part due to the fact that it would be a violation of numerous international, national, and state statues and codes of magical law, particularly blood status privacy law, but which was also in part due to his being a cop, and not having many feelings or so it seemed, perhaps having used them all when Wray’s mom had died — anyway, after delivering this eulogy, he had looked through the crowd and met Graeme’s eyes. 

With his eyes closed the expression played again and again against the darkness inside Graeme’s head like a home video on grainy rain-smeared VHS. Perhaps it was the first expression bearing not even a shade of pity that he had seen in a week. This expression did not so much connote disappointment as it connoted a sort of brutal satisfaction at having been correct. 

“Do you need groceries,” Clara was saying, a little conspiratorially, to Alex; around their table other conversations had broken out, about acoustic sets and covers and a compendium of related bullshit, and across the room Wray’s father was laughing again. Alex had pressed the side of her shoe against Graeme’s under the table in attempt to provide or perhaps to seek solidarity. He couldn’t see her face but he knew what it looked like — determined, closed. “Anything at all,” Clara went on (she was a little drunk), “I can bring it by…” 

\--

“Graeme?”

Standing above him at one of the tables by the wide windows on the second deck of the Bainbridge ferry was a tall girl — toffee-complected, long black hair, intense eyes and acne scars that on her sharp-boned face seemed almost artful — who was vaguely familiar. She had interrupted his scanning the harbor for seals. She was wearing an oversize moth-eaten Pendleton coat with droplets of rainwater sticking in the linty wool and she carried a beat-up black leather backpack over one shoulder. There were a few very fine spotty tattoos on her hands, and two slim silver rings. He thought he recalled she was in a band but he forgot which one and was wracked with a sudden shocked guilt that he couldn't for the life of him remember her name or really any circumstances of their meeting. 

“Can I sit with you?” she asked, evidently unsurprised by his bewilderment. 

“Yeah, of course.” He took his feet off the seat across from him and leaned forward to brush the dirt and pine needles he’d tracked in on the soles of his boots. “I’m really sorry, but was your name again?” 

“Alex Robinson. We met last Friday. I play in Kelpies.” She sat down and crossed her legs at the knee, loosening her heavy wool scarf. “I didn’t think you would remember my name.” 

“Yeah.” He could feel himself blushing. “Sorry.” 

“Do you always get so smashed at gigs.”

Graeme opened his mouth to answer but the captain blew the ferry horn powerfully to announce their departure from the dock. “Not just at gigs,” he said when it was over. Beneath them the huge ship jolted and hummed as the engine started. “Actually I have a flask of gin if you want some.” 

Alex’s brow lifted. But she held her hand out so he took the flask from his pocket and gave it to her. “What are you going out to Bainbridge for?”

“Terramancy.”

Now her brow twisted. Most of her expression was there, he realized, so she couldn’t hide pretty much anything she felt. He recalled a dim flash of watching her on stage. During a few songs he’d thought she was going to cry, and he thought if she cried he’d definitely cry, and then he thought he might cry anyway, or might actually have cried, couldn’t remember; she used distortion and amplification spells on her guitar he sometimes used too but they sounded different, sharper, or maybe colder, like skipping stones across thick ice, and her voice contorted like a gymnast from a vulnerable croon to an animal shriek… Out on the street afterward sharing a joint Wray had babbled for at least twenty minutes about how she was easily the best and most visionary musician in the city, bar none. Graeme thought he recalled agreeing though by that point he was functionally nonverbal thanks to the deadly cocktail of the two intoxicants he found most addictive: booze and noise. 

“Terramancy, the band?” Alex asked. 

“No — like the process, the magical process the band is named after, and I thought they broke up anyway after Devon died…” 

Alex nodded, passing the flask back. “What’s the process?”

“It’s like reading the magic that makes the earth. Sort of.”

“Sort of!”

“Well it can’t all be codified into spells…” 

“Is this why you drink,” Alex whispered conspiratorially, leaning toward him, “are you tortured by your forbidden knowledge?” 

“Magical theory as a practice has a bad reputation,” Graeme admitted, “but unless you’re actively trying to open a portal to death you’ll be fine. Ninety-nine percent of the time.” This was only sort of a lie because he had kind of fallen in once and hadn’t felt right for a few days. But no one needed to know about that and besides it wasn’t why he drank. 

“What about the other one percent of the time?”

“Well it can be kind of scary, you know. History… everything that’s down there.” 

“And you do this for fun?”

“Well this is for school. Sometimes I do it for fun.” 

He debated telling her that all the magical theory he did for fun was with sound, but she beat him to it. “Wray told me you play guitar,” she said. 

“Yeah, I do.” 

“He said you’re really good.” 

_God damn it_ , Graeme thought. 

“Could I hear you play anywhere,” Alex went on, “like are you in a band, do you record anything?” 

“No, no, sorry, neither, but maybe — ”

“Why?” 

“Why what?” 

“Why aren’t you in a band?” She gestured to him for the flask again. “I mean, they would probably let you play in Warlike Warlock.” 

Wray had recently talked his way into this band, in which he was responsible for noise. They played at least once a week in numerous venues around the city, opening for other locals and touring acts, playing a different set almost every time due simply to all three members’ hyperactivity and ambition. Despite the fact that Graeme and Wray were sixth years at Denny and as such were being reminded in every other class that these were the grades all the magical graduate colleges would be meticulously reviewing in determining their admissibility, they would cut class regularly to take the bus up to Madrona and magically sound-proof Graeme’s tiny bedroom and play music. Otherwise they would go to Goodwill on Dearborn and find old cassettes that Wray would magically doctor such that they might be used in the process of making noise in Warlike Warlock. Otherwise they would cut class because they were hungover, or because it had been a bad full moon night and Graeme had to clean Wray up, and then they had to go get a giant breakfast. 

“Maybe,” Graeme said. The truth is he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in a band at all, not least because he had to study, but even if he wanted to be in a band he probably wouldn’t’ve chosen Warlike Warlock, who sounded to him like Husker Du’s _New Day Rising_ except not good. “I don’t really, I’m not as good as Wray thinks I am,” he told Alex. 

“Oh, I doubt that…” 

When the ferry docked they walked together up the hill into town talking about the new Butthole Surfers record, _Rembrandt Pussyhorse_. “Where are you going to do terramancy,” Alex asked him. 

“There’s this place in North Town Woods.” 

“Can I come?” 

“Don’t you have — I thought you were coming out here for something.” 

“No, I just ride the ferry sometimes, you know.” 

They took the bus up Route 305, walked down New Brooklyn Road, keeping to the shoulder away from the speeding logging trucks, and headed into the woods. It had started to rain a little but the thin needles didn’t penetrate the heavy, dark treecover. Alex’s boots crunched in the loam. “How do you know where we’re going?” 

“Like a feeling.” 

“What’s the feeling?” 

“Oh, to me it feels like I’m a magnet — do you feel it?” 

She laughed; it was loud in the woods. He couldn’t help but laugh hearing her laugh. They had finished the gin on the bus. “It feels like you’re a magnet?” 

“Everyone’s different, you know, Wray said for him it feels like having left the oven on.” 

“Well, what if I always feel some amorphous anxiety?” 

“I do too,” Graeme told her, “it’s different.” 

As resonant sites on Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula went this one was pretty tame. Graeme had gone once before in third year at Denny in a magical theory club he’d briefly been a member of before his interest and skill in the subject surpassed a hobbyist’s. Folks studying the site over the past few years had left magical markers, which weren't really of much use owing to the focal point’s tendency to move. There was no other visible indication, and the woods were almost incredibly silent. “Is this it,” Alex whispered. 

“Yeah. You don’t have to whisper.” 

“It feels like someone else is here.” 

“Some _thing_ else is here.” 

They sat together on the cold damp ground. He pressed his palms to the earth and closed his eyes and beside him he felt her do the same. It came reaching up through his hands into his bones wrapping around him like vines to pull him closer. In this place it was so close to the surface it did not necessarily take reaching in. It wanted to show you what was inside. It wrapped around you and then you could pull it up hand over fist for as long as you could stand to dig. Beside him he felt Alex stiffen, and then she made a startled wordless sound, which he heard through the sort of windy white noise that was down very deep, centuries upon centuries of rain, the sound, which was at the core of every sound… And yet when he came up to check on her she was smiling. 

Alex was from the Colville Reservation, but she had left there when she was fifteen, had not gone back, and didn’t speak of it. She had gone to five years of magic school in Spokane and upon fleeing Westerly had decided that was enough education. She worked odd jobs and played in bands, wrote songs in her room, listened to the Cramps and Cocteau Twins. Through Alex Graeme met Mercedes, who played bass in Kelpies; it was rather obvious that they were a couple, but they didn’t talk about that either. They lived in a house together on Thirteenth and Pine with Mercedes’ brother, a Squib who was finishing a forestry degree at the University of Washington. They went over between school and shows for dinner and Graeme would sit in the living room trying to do his homework until he was invariably coaxed into the kitchen by delicious smells and/or a blunt or a cocktail or a beer, and laughter… He fell asleep wasted on the pull-out couch at 2am and woke up at dawn; Mercedes was making coffee, Wray was snoring sprawled out over most of the bed, his homework was unfinished on the floor and stepped on here and there; he couldn’t be bothered; he wondered on the way to school if perhaps he should feel guilty about being so happy, because he had a perfectly good family in Madrona that he never saw anymore. They just seemed not to know what to do with him. 

They went to shows, played shows; Graeme went to them all, and not to class; woke up in strange places, slept through the meeting the guidance counselor had called with his parents, failed remedial potions, was (eventually, miraculously) waitlisted for UW’s magical theory program. Wray started writing more songs for Warlike Warlock, and just when they started to sound not too much like Husker Du anymore he left the band, contributing to an acrimonious breakup. Around the same time, “coincidentally,” Montclair and the crew who lived at the Den found a new drummer and started a band called Killing Curse. They were loud and abrasive and sounded like their name and people started saying they were the best wizarding band in Seattle. It was summer 1988, early morning outside the werewolf registry, and Graeme had been awake for days writing a paper on magical theories of sound when Wray first broke the news: 

“Alex and I are starting a band.” 

They were walking together up Jackson toward Twelfth Ave en route to the diner on Capitol Hill, and they were obliged to walk very slowly because of Wray’s knees. Dockworkers and line cooks en route to the early shift hustled by them — Wray’s hairline was steadily bleeding and occasionally he was obliged to lean against Graeme, who knew he looked vaguely undead with exhaustion — without a second glance. “Cool,” said Graeme, already a little wary. 

“And I’m moving into the house with them at the end of the month. Oscar’s moving to Alaska.” 

“Is Mercedes going to — ”

“Yeah, I think. Got to find a drummer.” 

“Wasn’t Kevin Nguyen talking to you at the last Warlike Warlock show?” 

They stopped at a crosswalk, though there was no traffic so early, and Wray braced himself against Graeme’s shoulder and cracked his knees. “Kevin’s like, he’s _fine_ , I guess…” 

“He’s the best drummer that’ll speak to you now that Giles blames you for breaking up Warlike Warlock,” Graeme reminded him. 

“Maybe,” Wray said, a little absentmindedly. 

“Maybe what.” 

He thought he already knew what Wray would say. It had been obvious since he came out of the werewolf registry looking washed up on the shore of a new reality even more unfriendly than usual. In the still morning nothing moved. He watched Wray’s brow tighten just so. He wouldn’t quite look at Graeme. “I was going to say,” he said. 

Sometimes it was like coaxing information out of him piece by piece. Almost hilariously absurd when you saw someone’s blood all the time and could hear their soul. “What were you going to say.” 

“If you wanted, you know. Maybe you could play guitar.” 

When you could hear somebody’s soul it was recognizable in all sound. This morning city-sound, which was mostly summer silence, and the white-noise breeze… Wray turned to look down Rainier Ave toward the mountain so that Graeme could not see how tightly his brow was furrowed. It did not necessarily mean that he regretted asking. What it did perhaps mean was that he hated that he had to ask, because he hated that this was the only way. One particular perfect ringing pitch in the ceaseless blaring symphony of Wray’s powerful, interminable guilt. “Why?” Graeme asked him, before he could stop himself. 

“Why what?” 

“Why do you want me to — ”

“Because you’re the best.” 

“Who says I’m the best.”

“I do, Alex does…” 

Graeme tried a new tactic. “I have to study.” 

“You can do both.” 

“I didn’t manage to do both very well the whole time at Denny.” 

“Well college is different.” 

“Yeah it is, there’s more at stake.” 

“This is what you do anyway,” Wray reminded him. It was becoming increasingly clear that he had prepared an argument. “You’re writing a twenty-page paper about what you would just be doing in the band! It’s like theory and practice.” 

At a loss, Graeme went for the third and final piece of ammunition he had. “Well you can’t keep dragging everybody you know into this.” 

“Into what?” 

“Your fucking feud with Montclair, obviously!” 

“My _feud_ with — ” 

“I think you’d find that very few other people share the core ambition of being in a better band than Montclair given he has no musical ability and — ” 

“Any band that we’re in would be a better band than his.” 

“That’s what I’m saying!” 

“Well it isn’t about _better_ , Graeme, is what _I’m_ saying.” 

“You think Killing Curse are going to sell thousands of records?” 

“That’s not what I — Mike Fletcher from Sub Sub Pop was at the gig the other day — ”

“He’s at _every_ gig!” 

“Yeah, of the bands he’s gonna sign!” Wray pinched the bridge of his nose. At least he didn’t look guilty anymore. “Something’s going to happen. People are going to catch on. Don’t you feel it?” 

“I guess — ”

“I want what they catch onto to be ours. To be good — to be actually good — because it’s ours. Don’t you get it?” 

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the diner and had a very tense breakfast, then they didn’t speak for a week, until Graeme went by the house at Thirteenth and Pine already a little drunk, not necessarily intending to apologize, though he ended up apologizing, and he went to the practice space with Wray and Alex and listened to the bones of the songs. In another few weeks’ time Wray told him they had recruited a drummer, Marsden, who was about to be a seventh year at Denny, and Graeme was accepted to UW off the waitlist. 

Four days before the start of the semester Wray asked him to come by the practice space and hear what they’d written. Mercedes and Marsden were working through the coda of a song called “Monkshood,” and then the whole band played it through from the beginning. It was as though suddenly the sound came into the room with the five of them like a nightmare visitor — some big dark Eldritch shadow hovering in the corners like a spiderweb with no form. Marsden’s drumming owed something to their jazz training and Mercedes, as she had in Kelpies, played bass with little regard for the fact that it was supposed to be a rhythm instrument. Their groove rumbled like a generator in the basement. Atop this foundation Alex sang and screamed. It was like she found another voice inside herself and amplified it rather than attempting exorcism. It didn’t necessarily seem to fit her body or the world in which she lived; it was another thing, and sometimes it seemed to come from behind her… 

Wray’s riff was sharp and cutting, simple, effective, staggering. He played it in a kind of conversation against Mercedes’ bass, cutting into the rhythm of Alex’s vocal and Marsden’s sharp hits to the cymbal. He was using some of the distortion spells they’d first tried as kids on Graeme’s father’s guitar in the little dorm room overlooking Lake Washington — gummy, processed sounds, stark against the deep organic groove. He wouldn't quite look at Graeme when he played. The song sounded like being followed. It was as such Graeme realized what — when — it was about. 

It was unfinished, skeletal, alive, staggering. They had left space in it for Graeme. He got up from where he’d been sitting on Wray’s amp when it was finished, as they had all known would happen all along. There was a spare guitar in the corner which he tuned quickly with magic. They were watching him and each other in a breakable-feeling silence. At last he asked them to play it again. 

\--

Once everyone had left they went out back of the Elks Club to smoke a joint produced from the change pocket in Mercedes’ purse. It tasted like quarters. “Covers my ass,” said Alex. 

Graeme was realizing standing up that he'd had rather a lot of gin. There had been food but he hadn’t touched any. For their part Marsden had wrapped some of the miniature quiches in napkins and stuck them in the pocket of their jacket. 

“Like Presto could play covers of any of our songs,” Alex went on, because no one else was talking. “They don’t even have a guitarist.” 

“Yeah, but Clara rips on sax,” said Mercedes. 

“They’re a no-wave band. It doesn’t even count. It’s a different animal. Can you imagine…” 

“Graeme,” said Marsden, treading carefully. In the dim watery rain-light their face seemed swimming. They had the gentle eyes they had on when they would say things like, how about you have this potion, yeah, there’s lots of charcoal in it… Graeme had to look away. “I thought you were going to eviscerate Guildenstern.” 

“I don’t have the will for evisceration,” Graeme said. “He says — I think he must challenge himself to come up with the worst possible things to say.” 

“He asked — this is years ago — if we broke up Kelpies because of LBD,” said Mercedes. 

“LB — little black dress?” 

“Lesbian bed death,” Mercedes and Alex chorused. 

Marsden laughed. “Well, did you?” 

“We broke up Kelpies because Wray asked us to be in a band,” Alex said, with extreme finality. She passed the ember of the joint to Marsden. It had started raining again, thin needle rain. An ambulance went by out front on the street. The sound filtered down the alley from the front of the Elks Club along with the voices of the remaining Thornes debating which bars to colonize. 

“Are we going to play together again,” Marsden said after a little while. 

“He said he wanted us to in the note,” Graeme mumbled. 

“There was a — ”

“It was addressed to Graeme.” 

“You all can read it. I don’t care. It’s for all of us just filtered through me. But he said — ” 

_I’ll be in the music with you all the time._

Mercedes wrapped her arm around his shoulders and clasped the back of his neck warmly like a lioness with cubs. 

“It’s just — you all can read it, if you want to. It’ll explain some things.” 

“Like the werewolf thing?” Marsden asked. When everyone turned to them they said, “I mean, it was obvious.” 

It was so strange not to have to hide it anymore. To not spend his every waking hour trying to build the wall around it in one way or another to conceal it even from their very dearest friends. “Yeah,” he said, “like that.” 

They had finished the joint. It was raining harder now and nothing seemed quite real. How to tell them, it lasted longer than it might’ve without us, and we were winning all the battles, but we lost the war, because the more we loved him and the more he loved us the more ammunition we handed over without even meaning to… 

“We ought to go home,” Alex said, “it’s raining.” It was always raining, and now it would never stop raining again, but it had never stopped them before, standing out on pitch-dark streets at midnight in the sideways mist, laughing… “Are you coming?” she asked Graeme. 

He had been figuring out how to formulate this lie since the cemetery. “I think I’m going to go to my parents’ house,” he said. The trick was not to give any of them time to believe him or not before he Apparated. 

\--

Three weeks after Graeme joined the band he arrived a few minutes after sunrise to the Werewolf Registry to find Wray already out on the sidewalk talking as animatedly as was possible through pain and exhaustion to Lockett Schaff, with whom he was sitting on the curb sharing a cigarette.

Rumor had it that Schaff had grown up with Montclair in rural Idaho. Other sorts of rumors (eg. those from Wray) had it that he was the first person Montclair had bitten, of at least forty. (Wray didn’t say _victim_ , because he didn’t like that word.) Schaff was tall and rail-thin, junkie-thin, with a lot of scars and even more tattoos. He was also one of the best guitar players in Seattle, which made it a shame that he enjoyed squandering his talents in favor of a heroin habit which was the stuff of legend, and that he was seemingly under exclusive contract to Montclair, having played in Terrormancy and now in Killing Curse and in precisely no other bands. He lived at the Den, but Montclair never gave him a ride home from the cells. And he was the only one of all Montclair’s cronies who didn’t call Graeme _Sugar_. Graeme liked him, but he was never very conversational, likely also due to the heroin habit; Wray tolerated him about a hair more than he tolerated anyone else who lived at the Den or any of the other werewolves who visited the Registry. 

When Graeme crouched in the street beside the two of them Schaff looked him over with a weak attempt at a smile, which was really just an infinitesimal upward curling of the left corner of his narrow lips. He was wearing a grungy yellow and navy blue flannel with the shoulder drenched in blood, which he did not seem to have noticed. “I’m offering you a show,” he slurred. 

“Have you even heard — ”

“No. I don’t give a fuck. I know it’s good.” 

“When?” 

“Next Saturday.” He reached for his cigarettes in the front pocket of the flannel shirt, and Graeme watched him realize that his shoulder was bleeding. “Nightshade dropped out. It’s us and these two touring bands from fuckin’ Humboldt State.” 

“We want to play third,” Wray said, looking desperately to Graeme for backup. There was blood in his eye. 

“Second,” Schaff said. Clearly this debate had been going on for a while. “Montclair wants you to play first. Well actually he doesn't want you to play at all but whatever.” 

“How are you going to convince him?” Graeme asked. 

“Present it as the only option and if that doesn’t work, withhold the drugs.” 

“If we play second,” Wray said, “we need to play for a half hour.” 

“Twenty minutes.” 

“Twenty-five.” 

“Fine. It had better be good.” 

“It is good,” Graeme said. “I borrowed that spell series that you used to do on ‘Bleeding Edge.’” He also thought that Wray had borrowed more than Schaff’s spell series on a few riffs, but that didn’t necessitate mentioning, and it didn't seem likely that Schaff ever had the mental capacity to notice. “It’s really loud. Sounds like Lee and Thurston on _Confusion is Sex_.” 

Schaff looked between the two of them, lighting another cigarette. “If you play better than us I’ll give you thirty percent from the door.” 

“And if we don’t?” 

“Fifteen percent.” 

“Twenty.” 

“Seventeen.” 

“Fine.” 

“And you have to find someone to do your sound,” Schaff added. “I’d do it, but you know.” 

It was unclear whether he was referring to the presumed fact that Montclair wouldn’t let him, the presumed fact that Wray wouldn't want him to, or the inarguable fact that he’d probably be too high to do it to Wray’s standards. 

“We could ask Rosencrantz,” Graeme told Wray, who winced. Ross hadn’t spoken to Wray since he’d quit Warlike Warlock to start Crucia, but he worked at a recording studio and was the best man for the job. “I’ll ask him,” Graeme corrected. 

“Be there at seven to load in,” Schaff said. He struggled to his feet and stumbled, grasping Wray’s shoulder to steady himself. His knees wobbled together and one of his boots was untied. They helped him to the bus stop, or rather Graeme helped him to the bus stop, also half-supporting Wray, and then they walked slowly up the hill toward the diner, where Graeme ordered basically everything on the breakfast menu and Wray went to the payphone on the corner and called up Alex, Mercedes, and Marsden. 

Graeme had started the magical theory degree track at the University of Washington not a month previous and yet didn’t hesitate to miss class to rehearse in the sweltering room on Tenth Avenue. Wray called in sick to his job at a printshop down in Georgetown so many days in a row his boss eventually told him not to come back. On the day of the show they arrived to load in at six out of nerves. The touring bands arrived late because of traffic on the interstate north from Portland, so for about two hours all five of them stood on the corner chain-smoking in silence, chewing their nails in fear they’d need to play first to kill time. When the two beat-up VW vans with California plates pulled up Wray audibly sighed with relief. 

Dismal Youth, the California band tapped to play third, had just been signed to Sub Sub Pop and were accruing a cult following amongst the Northwest’s vibrant wizarding punk scene. Because of that, and the promise of a headlining set from Killing Curse, the Den was crowded early. Graeme sat on the beat-up couch in the long entrance hall, stomach twisting with nerves, bouncing his knee wildly, until Mercedes appeared with a Nalgene bottle full of tequila. “Drink up,” she said. 

“I’m going to puke everywhere, Merce.” 

“No you’re not.” 

They waited together, not speaking, sharing the Nalgene bottle, while the first band played in the other room. When the sound died so did a piece of Graeme’s soul. Heading into the cavernous performance space to set up felt like walking a gauntlet to his own execution. He had been in this room probably hundreds of times before but had never set foot upon the makeshift plywood stage. To do so felt like some kind of massive insult to the heavens and the ancestors for which he would certainly be smote with lightning. Wray was already there, talking to Alex while he tuned his guitar. They both leveled Graeme with expressions of utmost sympathy which of course did nothing to quell the possessing terror. 

The only light in the room was a bare red bulb swinging like a pendulum above the stage. Even the streetlight from outside had been blocked from the tall wide windows by thick velvet curtains. From the mixing board to the left side of the stage Ross was adding further amplification spells to the already-tenuous multiplicity, a limp unlit joint hanging between his lips. 

With magic there was no need for the intricate pedal chains and tuning devices of Muggle bands. Some bands didn’t even use amps, preferring amplification spells directly to the guitars. _Total Magical Melody_ , which Graeme and Wray had been reading together in the Denny Academy library since age twelve, always held firm that electric guitars sounded best through magicked amps. This process gave less magically confident witches and wizards the opportunity to distort the sounds they were creating in several ways — through the instrument itself, the amplifier, and the mixing board — without having to work magic during a performance. And it gave someone like Graeme, who had challenged himself since he had first picked up a guitar to put as much magic in the sound as possible, an opportunity to make a truly unholy racket. 

He plugged in his guitar and tried a chord. He’d already done the basic magic he wanted on the guitar and the amp back at the practice space but suddenly in the swallowing dark red room it did not seem anywhere near enough. Marsden rolled a snare snap on their drums and Wray moved through a series of quick riffs, mentally switching magical distortions. Alex was checking the mic by lazily singing Nomeansno’s “Sex Mad.” Mercedes dragged her thumbnail up and down the top string of her bass. _Ready?_ she mouthed at Graeme. 

In fact he wasn’t at all — he wasn’t even sure what magic felt missing — but he nodded. Mercedes signaled to Alex and played just a tease of the creeping bass phrase from “Monkshood.” 

He knew Alex had written the song around one of Wray’s riffs about something that had happened to her which she didn’t otherwise speak about. Of course the riff Wray had written had been about the same kind of thing, so all the noise Graeme had put on it had been about that too. He had never allowed himself to be angry about it; there hadn’t been time, and anyway it didn’t seem fair, because it had happened to Wray. He tried to put himself inside the feeling which was inside the memory which was they were running up the hill together and the clouds moved across the moon and all of a sudden he was living another very different life inside an instant — 

Marsden’s drums rolled like thunder. Graeme drew all the magic he could stand — magic without a name or words, raw power, anger and resignation, every vengeful hex, and the sound of the rain, the city and the moon, the cars passing below on the freeway, and the orange caramel light seeping like blood out from the overpass, the sound, the sound — out of this feeling and into the guitar. Then he hit it, hard, just above the strings with the side of his fist. The room shook. 

Wray was watching him, making noise against the taut-stretched strings between the pickups and the bridge of his instrument. Behind him Alex swayed, clutching her mic. Graeme listened into the wash of sound for Mercedes’ bass cue and shaped the magic inside his guitar. This time around her phrase he gouged three knife-sharp chords. The drums snapped and clattered out of tune or time to anybody except Marsden. Then the rhythm developed or congealed — actualized, in form, and moved. Mercedes grasped it, and her bass phrase looped and turned rhythmic. Wray followed, shifting the spells on his guitar. 

Alex slipped the mic out of its stand and unwrapped the wire slowly. It felt like she stood on the opposite side of some great rift from Graeme and they were watching one another to see who would jump first. Wray’s riff changed to cue them both, and Alex screamed. It was a gut-sound, a sobbing blood-sound, and when it curdled off she just did it again, eyes pinched closed, pulling a fist of the fabric of her dress away from her chest, as though making room for the noise. Graeme jumped with her, trying to make his guitar make his version of the feeling of her scream. Over Wray's shoulder she was watching him, and her face contorted and twisted with grief. He wrestled the sound under her vocal, which shifted from another scream into words: 

_I was young when I trusted you  
_ _Broke-down, busted you_

She stepped over the monitors toward the crowd, barefoot, an avenging ghost: 

_Rusted, lusted  
_ _With myself disgusted  
_ _Monkshood, monkshood, monkshood_

Most of Graeme’s consciousness was in his guitar when they played. He felt like a being made of sound. At the end when he took the spells off the instrument his knees buckled under him. He didn’t fall only because Wray was holding him up. The entire room was suspended in a kind of sustained scream and at first he thought it was only the sound from his guitar, which was pressed against Wray’s belt buckle (he’d long since thrown his own instrument on the floor to step on it). Then Alex embraced him too. There was blood in her mouth, because she had bitten through her tongue. 

Over Wray’s shoulder Ross was begrudgingly applauding over the mixing board. Behind him, stirring out of the deep inky shadows like a demonic pair of ghosts or succubi, were Schaff and Montclair. The former’s usually-emotionless expression bore a thread of satisfaction and pride about the lips and brow. The latter, red-faced and bug-eyed, turned into the darkness when he met Graeme’s eyes. 

_Success,_ Graeme thought, before he could stop himself.

\--

In process of drunken Apparition he left behind a thumbnail and, he realized later when he took his shoes off and his left sock was caked in blood, a toenail too. He landed a little awkwardly and stumbled against a dumpster, startling a damp raccoon. It had chewed open a garbage bag which exuded kitchen trash and the eerie glassy glint of syringes. Out on the street a gaggle of wasted UW students traipsed past clinging to each other and laughing. They silenced awkwardly at the sight of Graeme and as such he realized his hand was profusely bleeding because the thumbnail was gone. 

He rang the buzzer four or five times before Cal let him in, and then he forgot which floor Cal lived on. He was waiting out in the hall for Graeme when he finally recalled it was in the basement. “I splinched myself,” Graeme told him. 

“What? Where?”

“My fingernail,” he said. He was holding the wounded thumb tightly in the opposite hand and blood was welling up in the web of his fingers. 

Cal ushered him inside and shut and locked the door. He had been painting with the TV on, tuned to a Muggle football game with the volume muting. The miasma of oil paints and stale marijuana smoke and burnt toast hung in the air like a bad spell. “Okay so, not a leg,” Cal said. He was digging for something under the sink. 

“Not a leg,” said Graeme. “Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

Cal stood up. “I did,” he said, brow furrowing. “Laurent and Lisa and I were at the wake. I shook your hand in the receiving line.” 

Graeme didn’t recall this. It was perplexing, as usually he remembered most things having to do with Cal, Laurent, and Lisa, as they were embroiled in a polyamorous love triangle which had been the stuff of intense rumor for at least three years. “Oh,” he said, “right.” 

Cal rolled his eyes and bent to rummage under the sink again and Graeme inspected what he had been working on, careful to keep his bloody hand away from the canvas. It was stretched out on the bare wood floor an incredible riot of shocking verdant greens. Entirely without any formal suggestion in the work itself he understood it was meant to be the rainforest. 

They had asked Cal to make the cover for Crucia’s debut album, because he was the best painter any of them knew. In recollection of this Graeme remembered the album for the first time in days, and that it was pretty much finished, except for the layout and some of the mixing, and that they had signed a contract, and that they were on the hook to turn it in to Sub Sub Pop in less than a month’s time. He turned away from the painting to keep from puking on it and stumbled over nothing on the floor. “Sugar,” Cal said. 

Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to tell anyone who ever called him by that stupid nickname again that he was well and over it. After all Montclair had made it up as one of his numerous methods of emotional torture and weaponized infantilization and it had caught on, to Montclair’s extreme delight, even with people who ostensibly liked Graeme. This was all just too much to even hold inside the very bruised half-drowned mind so he just said, “What.” 

“Come over here.” 

Graeme didn’t / couldn’t move so Cal came over and dragged him toward the sink and ran his bloody hands under the warm water. The blood was seeping out from the place where the fingernail was missing like a wash of watercolor and it ran off Graeme’s hands and around Cal’s dirty dishes and circled the clogged drain like rust from the faucet. Cal’s thumb pressed against his palm and traced the thin lines. Eventually Graeme leaned against him by the shoulder just until he felt Cal shift to accept his weight, a little reluctantly. Eventually the reality of the situation came to him through the drunkenness and he stood up again, and Cal turned the water off and bound the wound in the rag he’d dug out from under the sink. 

“You look like hell, Sugar,” said Cal. He took in the rumpled suit with the big lapels and the black flannel. His gaze lingered at the open collar of Graeme’s shirt. There was a little green paint, Graeme noticed for the first time, at the bridge of his nose, as though he’d rubbed there contemplatively while he was working. “What are you doing here.” 

There was a simple answer but it was not edifying. So instead Graeme said, “What are you painting.” 

“The rainforest.” 

“Can we have it for the cover?” 

“I already gave you the cover,” said Cal. Indeed he had, and they had all loved it, and they had crowed over it in the front room of the house, and Cal had preened a little shamelessly. It was a lovely abstract piece washed with red. Red, Cal had said, was the color of their music and their name. “Tannic,” he had explained, expostulating with hands in the living room in the gold dusk light through the window, “tannic and menstrual… roses, rust, violence, desire, sunset, lipstick, blood, blood in the water, algal bloom, sunrise, birth — ”

“We get it, Cal,” Wray had said, “it’s red.” 

They hadn’t been able to pay for it, or at least not yet, because of the terms of the contract with Sub Sub Pop, and so Cal had held a sort of debt over Graeme’s head sexually. He was paying for it through the nose. He kept going back for some reason. 

“I think maybe green,” Graeme told Cal. 

Cal's face went through a series of shocked expressions that under any other circumstance might have been comical. “What? Why?” 

“I don’t know. Envy. Plus the new Mother Love Bone album has red.” 

“So? Green River has green, obviously.” 

“We are aspirationally green,” said Graeme. “The record is a movement from red to aspirationally green.” 

“You’re fucking wasted,” Cal announced, as though this were surprising. 

“Yeah, obviously,” Graeme told him. He crouched beside the painting. He thought he could have reached into it and touched something. They went driving up into the woods to the hunting lodge near Index and foraged for mushrooms and tripped outside by the firepit watching the bats and in the morning he woke early still feeling everything which was bleeding out of the world and lay in the grass bleeding into the world. It was so green. He did this until it didn’t make sense anymore, and then Wray came over. This was before his knees were really so bad. They walked until they were lost and had to navigate back to the lodge with magic. In the morning they drove over Stevens Pass and through Peshastin where Graeme had been born and grown up until he came to Seattle to board at Denny, and in Wenatchee they took the road North along the Columbia toward Chelan where very long ago unimaginable floods had carved the landscape into strange jagged channeled mazes. After a while it was so nowhere there was no FM radio so they listened to classical on the AM bands intercut with static and alien messaging… 

“Calvin,” Graeme said, trying to keep his voice measured and even like an aloof buyer at an antiques show, “I need this painting at any cost. You can come on my face again. I don’t fucking care.” 

“You’re so vulgar when you’re drunk, Sugar.” 

He stood up; his knees cracked, like Wray’s always had. “Don’t call me that,” he said. 

“I’ve always called you — ” 

“Well you can’t anymore. Fuck off.” 

“Fine,” said Cal. He had folded his arms over his chest in mock frustration but there was something Graeme hated in the shape of his mouth, like the beginnings of a smirk. “What are you doing here, Graeme.” 

So there was no escaping the question. “I feel like I’m dying,” Graeme said, “so I feel like maybe a good fuck would help.” 

Cal’s eyebrows were halfway up his forehead and the smirk spread across his face like spreading paint with a palette knife. “You come into my house,” he said, “you demand and insult my artwork — ” 

“Cal — ”

“I’m savoring this moment,” Cal said. 

“Fuck you.” 

“Whatever. Fine. Come on.” 

The other room in the tiny apartment was mostly bed. The rain had moved off and the moonlight was filtering in through the single high window which opened onto the back alley. If he listened closely enough into the silence he could hear the raccoon still rattling in the dumpster. Clothing was strewn all over the floor, most of it by its style and colorfulness and lack of paint stains evidently not belonging to Cal, along with empty bottles, dishes, painting supplies… Cal sat him down on the unmade bed. “What do you mean exactly by a good fuck?” 

“Don’t be gentle.” 

“Okay, easy enough.” 

“You never are, you know that?” 

“Yeah. I mean, I thought you liked it — ”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Cal.” 

He tried to take his shoes off but couldn’t manage the laces so Cal had to help him. As such they both realized the further extent of the splinching, though by this point it had stopped bleeding. Perhaps, Graeme thought, he should be mildly alarmed that he hadn’t even felt it. But there were so many things about this whole endeavor that should’ve mildly alarmed him that he had lost track. Perhaps this also was mildly alarming. Perhaps someday he would wake up from the nightmare to find everything had fallen away while he was too numb to realize. 

“Sug — Graeme,” said Cal. “Look at me.” 

He wasn’t really one for kissing but his face was close to Graeme’s face and he smelled like bourbon and oil paints. 

“Are you going to stay with me.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah.” 

His hand was inside Graeme’s shirt. Who even knew where the suit coat with the big lapels had gone, or what had happened to most of the buttons on the flannel. Cal’s hand opened and spread against Graeme’s heartbeat in his ribs against the not-so-old raised scar there. “Are you with me,” he said again. 

“I’m here.” 

As though by saying it aloud it became true. Who even knew where here was? 

“Look at me,” said Cal. “Watch me.” 

His knuckles were stained with paint in the creases. All that lovely, lovely green. 

\--

A wizarding band from New England who had opened shows for Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr planned to tour to the West coast, and somehow through friends of friends they’d gotten the phone number of the house on Thirteenth Avenue. They called at 9am Seattle time so Graeme woke with the ringing oscillating through his skull, warping his hungover mush-brain around the sound like a sculptor with some molten metal. Mercedes, perpetually the earliest to rise, made it to the phone in time to quell the brunt of the torment before it became unbearable. After a while she put the phone down to summon Wray, who came dragging himself from his room as though awoken from the dead. He took the receiver and sat on the floor, resting his forehead against the cool metal of the washing machine. Graeme by this point had managed to sit and press his eye sockets into his kneecaps in effort to destroy all visible light. The last thing he remembered from the evening previous, though perhaps by this point it had been the morning, was running into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Dick’s Drive-In; in the alley around the corner Guildenstern had produced from the pocket of his jean jacket a flask of gin and Rosencrantz from the pocket of his leather coat a little baggie of coke. It was raining and the yellow-gold streetlight seemed smeared or scraped across the world like butter over hot toast. 

Someone sat on the end of Graeme’s pull-out couch of pain — Mercedes, by the particular creaking. “Did someone die,” Graeme asked her, voice raw. 

“It’s this band — Something Basilisk, from back East, they want a show.” 

“It’s nine in the morning.” 

“Not for them it’s not.” 

From the kitchen Wray laughed painfully into the phone receiver. Graeme felt the pale lunar flare of his magic when he summoned paper and a pen from the living room to write down the particulars. 

The band was called Fang of the Basilisk. Apparently they had explained to Wray on the phone that they had initially been called Basilisk Fang before they had realized this name was already taken. They were interested in playing in Seattle in part because they had an in with Mike and Meg at Sub Sub Pop. The nature of this ‘in’ had not been precisely defined on the phone. At a more reasonable hour Wray made some investigatory calls. Splanchomancy couldn't play but Kyla said she thought her new band Bran’s Bone Knife could open. Laurent agreed to let it happen at Alki Gallery on January 20 provided Crucia could find help to work the door, tend bar, and do sound, and hand over thirty percent of the proceeds. This was frankly ridiculous and essentially guaranteed they wouldn’t get a cut themselves but Wray agreed before any of the rest of them could argue on it. They called back and confirmed with the drummer from Fang of the Basilisk and then they went to the diner for Bloody Marys, and, at last, when it was nearly dark, across the street to the rehearsal space, where, through her headache, Alex showed them three new songs. 

Graeme went up to UW on a Tuesday afternoon for a meeting with his advisor in the magical theory department, who told him that frankly his grades on his written finals had been dismal and that he was hanging on to his position by a thread given the “impressive, if non-traditional at best” results of his practical examinations. “You have demonstrated your extreme adeptness at most forms of aural and sound magic,” she told him, “and I’m eager to see you demonstrate, well, basically any other skills…” 

It felt bad but was more than warranted. He went to a bar on the Ave where they didn’t check ID and sat in a dark corner drowning it. Eventually Wray showed up. Graeme wondered if he’d called him and forgotten about it. “They’re going to kick me out of college,” he said. “You can get whatever you want on my tab.” 

“They’re not going to kick you out of college,” said Wray. 

“They should.” 

“Why should they.” 

“I literally can’t do anything right.” 

When sober he reflected sometimes on how Wray never seemed to know what to do when he felt like this. 

“You can do lots of things right, Graeme.” 

He folded his arms on the sticky table and put his head down. Hidden somewhere in here was a warm womblike darkness whose spinning was manageable. Wray reached across the table and clasped his wrist as though to communicate something Graeme was too drunk to decipher, or else that was indecipherable. Perhaps it was a gesture whose cipher he himself did not in fact understand. When neither of them could figure it out Wray moved his hand away. He was bouncing his knee wildly under the table. 

“You sound really good on those new songs,” Wray told him. “You did that really right.” 

“That’s the problem,” Graeme heard himself slur, muffled against his arm. 

“Why is it the problem?” 

He sat up. The room twisted and shifted and slid off itself behind his eyes so he closed them. It’s me, he thought about saying, had been trying to say; it’s me, it’s the core of myself, and it’s not enough. “I can’t do both,” he said instead. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t.” 

“I can’t quit college.” 

“Well you can’t quit the band either.” 

“Why not.” 

“Because we need you. Because we’re really good because of you.” 

He opened one eye. Through the bleariness Wray had leant across the table to study him with an expression of pure desperation which was blinding in its beauty and pain and in its deep nostalgia-inducing familiarity. He closed the eye again and pressed the heels of his hands into both sockets. 

“Not everyone is cut out for college, Graeme — ”

“I know — ”

“ — and if you quit now it doesn’t mean you can’t go back.” 

“Well if I fail it does mean that.” 

“So maybe you should quit before you fail,” Wray suggested diplomatically. 

He put his head down again in defeat and folded his arms over the back of his skull like some survival structure in the dark woods. After a moment he felt Wray’s hand against the wedge of his exposed hair. “I can’t do it without you,” he said. His fingernails, which he chewed short, not that it helped him on the full moon nights, skritched against Graeme’s scalp in an expanding, radiating oval. In the darkness behind his eyes he could almost imagine the color and sounds of the feeling’s oscillating movement. Wray leaned close enough to be heard in a low voice over the bar noise — the symphonic hubbub of fratty types cackling over hockey on the grainy TVs hoisted overhead to prevent their being shattered in a riot should UW lose the Apple Cup. “I need you,” Wray said, “we need you — and you can’t leave. You just can’t.” 

Something was stirring in the back of Graeme’s mind. It was a little emaciated animal mostly made of teeth. Usually he felt it in his stomach or behind his ribs but sometimes it showed up in his head, shoving at the walls. When it was here he could feel it trying to speak, because it manifest as the sort of tea leaves of a migraine dropped into hot water. Sometimes his brain registered the suggestion of the words. This time they were, How much are you going to let your entire life and everything you do be about him? 

Wray’s fingers had paused in their skritching; he was waiting for Graeme to respond. After a long moment he grabbed Graeme’s wrist again and pulled it toward the table, and Graeme realized perhaps Wray thought he’d passed out, not that he hadn’t done that before under not dissimilar circumstances. He lifted his head and propped his chin against his fist on the table, watching Wray, trying to keep the skepticism from his face. That thing was slamming itself against the front of his skull between his browbone and hairline as though it were trying to wedge a crack for light. 

“This show’s going to be it,” Wray said. There was a pitch of wishful intent in his voice indicating he was going to say this as many times as possible in order to make it so. “Something’s going to happen.” 

At first it didn’t seem like anything would happen at all. That weekend Graeme came over to the house on 13th Avenue (having filed his paperwork to withdraw from UW and already having consumed the better part of a fifth of gin wrapped in a paper bag on the bus down to Capitol Hill) to find the rest of Crucia listening to the Fang of the Basilisk demo cassette, which the band had been kind enough to send them via owl post marked Conway, Massachusetts. Before hearing the tape Wray at least had figured Crucia could outplay this band and steal their thunder with Sub Sub Pop. After hearing the tape it became clear this would take a minor miracle. They sounded like Wire or the Fall via Black Sabbath. Graeme leaned against the doorframe listening to the music through the rest of the band’s silence and chewed his longest remaining fingernail off. Blood started welling up in the nailbed and by the time he’d gotten it to stop Wray had already come over and patted him down in search of the gin, so he could finish it. 

“We should play the new one,” Alex said when the tape was over. 

“Oh my god,” said Graeme, “I don’t know…” 

“We have to play the new one,” Wray declared with the force of law. 

The new one was called “The Mirror.” Alex hadn’t finished the lyrics for it yet, and neither had Graeme finished arranging his piece. He thought the song was the best thing Alex and Wray had made so far, and it deserved something he wasn’t sure he was capable of making, given that he could now officially call himself a college dropout whose understanding of magical theory was “non-traditional at best.” 

They went down to the practice space — Mercedes bought another fifth of gin on the way — and played through “The Mirror” until it sounded like nothing at all. It was like trying to make a fire with wet wood; nothing was catching, least of all in the increasing desperation. After untold hours or perhaps the entire night or perhaps weeks, Mercedes and Marsden and Alex went out to hunt down food and weed. In the humming feedback from their abandoned instruments Wray circled the room as though he were conducting some ritual. Eventually he put all the lights out except one, and he magicked the bulb red. 

Graeme was sitting on his amp trying to tug his mind from the control of the thing that was mostly teeth, whose gnashing and muttering might roughly be translated to, At last you have squandered any talent you have ever possessed, it has been tugged away from you while you weren't watching, because you didn’t watch enough, like loose yarn from a sweater, now it’s all unravelled, and you’ll never put it back together, and who knows what else you’re losing while you’re not watching, while you can’t watch… 

At the height of despair Wray came over and arranged the fingers of Graeme’s left hand into a chord shape he didn’t recognize. 

“What — ”

“I don’t know what it is. Just play it. Slow! Let it all ring.” 

He shaped the magic inside the guitar, thinking of the grist and blood inside the word _ring_. Then he played the chord. 

“Nice,” he told Wray. 

“Yeah. Do it again.” 

He played it a few times before he realized that if it wasn’t quite _ring_ there would be a place for it to move, which inside his head was laying this path through the darkness. He changed the magic and hit the chord again, hopscotched to the next step, then the next. When he got lost he started again. Eventually he looked up to find that the rest of the band had come back with a pizza (half olives, half peppers and onions) and an eighth. “Is that it, Graeme,” Alex said with her mouth full. 

“Think so.” 

It kind of made him weightless. Like he took himself out of himself and it was only sound. Out of himself there was no pain. There was no feeling at all. They ate and rolled a joint and then they played it again. He let Wray’s chord and the dance steps after it bleed down into all the cracks in the song like liquid metal filling a mold. 

“How’d you do that,” Mercedes asked after two run-throughs. “You were dying on us like twenty minutes ago.” 

“Wray showed me a chord.” 

“Yeah,” Wray said, tuning his guitar, “ _one_ chord…” 

It only felt good to be needed if you could be what was needed. Otherwise it was just paralyzing. 

The show was on a Friday. When Fang of the Basilisk showed up around three in the afternoon they all went together to the diner on Capitol Hill where Wray magnanimously agreed that Crucia would play second. Then they got everything in the van and drove with Fang of the Basilisk’s van following up to Alki Gallery in Wallingford. Graeme was standing in the back with Cal, who Laurent had sweet-talked into tending bar, drinking gin from a paper cup and watching Bran’s Bone Knife set up, when two familiar figures appeared in the door like manifestations of some prophetic god-dream. Mike Fletcher, the founder of Sub Sub Pop Records, was in his early thirties, nondescript and bearded, a sometime hardcore drummer from the Palouse with a nonsensical degree in magical agriculture. Meg Reese, a slight black woman with a shaved head, a motorcycle license, and a fondness for leather everything, somehow managed the seemingly impossible responsibility of keeping the company financially afloat. Cal, who seemingly hadn’t noticed or cared that they had been joined by deities, was talking Graeme’s ear off about something Lisa and/or Laurent had said, but this was only noise. Across the room Graeme caught Wray’s eye. His eyebrows had disappeared into his artfully disheveled dishwater hair. 

Bran’s Bone Knife, with Kyla on drums, played a great first show, heavy and blunt as their name. Graeme, in attempt to avoid continued conversation with Cal, helped them clear their stuff from the stage before setting up his guitar. The rest of the band filtered slowly up through the crowd to join him, Mercedes last, with her plum lipstick mostly worn off and a fresh hickey on her neck that Alex eyed with supreme distaste. When she had plugged in Wray played the chord he’d shown Graeme for “The Mirror.” He was thinking the Latinate sound spell for ring or resound, _percrepo_ , so it sounded different than Graeme’s would, a little prettier, a little more like how Wray thought, how he played, how he was: controlled, considered, sharp, intentional… Mercedes followed him, shaping her bass notes around the riff, and Marsden’s drums clattered like something falling over. Alex was unwrapping the mic cable from the stand in a slow ritualistic pace, almost meditative. 

Graeme met Wray’s eyes and something clicked into place. Sometimes he had the feeling they were always supposed to be like this. They hit the chord again together; Graeme’s was jagged and heavier so it sunk, like a hot stone. People had started filtering in again from outside and he saw them in his periphery as sort of a manifest wrath of shadows. Already most of him had forgotten why they were there and what they were doing. Alex’s eyes were closed. She had taken her shoes off. Sometimes at the practice space she sang this part but this time she was speaking, a kind of poetic recitation, covering her eyes with her hand, as though she couldn't bear to know she was being watched: 

_You made me your mirror  
_ _Until I forgot I was myself_

Wray’s riff undercut the growing rhythm. The trick was, as always, as in everything, to be his mirror. 

_When I look in the mirror  
_ _I can see your face in mine  
_ _Your look in my eyes  
_ _Your teeth in my mouth_

She was spitting the words now, like a spell. Marsden’s drums reached the exact sound of thunder. 

_I know we’re the same now  
_ _We’re the same now_

It — the song, the sound, consciousness, reality, separateness between them, the frosted filthy glass in the high windows, every lightbulb in the little dark room, eardrums, teeth, history, the world — shattered. 

What did it feel like when you were torn apart from someone at the beginning of time? And then your souls evolved divergently? And had you ever found one another before? And maybe none of it was supposed to be. Maybe it had never been anything more or less than an evil omen. Maybe it had never been anything other than foolhardy to consider fate. Perhaps circumstance was all. Perhaps the universe operated without order. Perhaps there was nothing deeper than demonstrable truth. Perhaps chaos governed reality. But if all this was true, how could two separate people do this? 

When they played together he could believe for twenty minutes that there was no curse which was unbreakable and that there was no question which could not be answered and that fate was a perfect series of prescribed unchoices because that they were alive at the same time in the same city breathing the same air and the same sound proved incontrovertibly that there could be nothing unconsidered and nothing unsolvable about nature. 

Afterward it felt like things moved slower. It was like standing up on the shore after swimming a long distance. When they had packed up and loaded everything into the van parked around back of the venue they went out front onto Roosevelt and walked down to the corner of Northeast 53rd Street. Here, with an unbothered cool suggesting she couldn’t sense the insistent needle rain, Meg Reese was leaning against her bike literally smoking a cigar. “Hold on a minute, y’all, Mike’s coming,” she said. Then she raised her voice, which echoed in the dark rain-lit street, so that he might hear: “He’s pissing in the alley like an animal.” 

“The line for the toilet was, like, really long,” Wray said, in an uncharacteristically awkward attempt at conversation. He was standing so close that Graeme could almost feel his rapid heartbeat where their shoulders pressed together. 

Meg furrowed her brow and took a contemplative puff from the cigar with the attitude of an 1890s railroad baron. Somehow she held the acrid stinking smoke in long enough to exhale it pointedly in Mike’s face when he emerged from the alley, struggling to zip his too-tight jeans. At the sight of the band members he comically smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand in a kind of flabbergasted awe. The cloud of cigar fog lent this gesture a cinematic significance like something out of a tragicomic Silent starring Buster Keaton. “What a set, you guys,” he crowed, retrieving a flask from his back pocket. “You drink bourbon?” 

It was the preferred liquor of precisely none of them, but Marsden reached out and took the proffered flask anyway. 

“We want to put out a record for you,” Mike went on flatly. “Your band is like a nightmare vision.” 

“We can’t really sign you for a run of albums because we have precisely no money,” Meg explained, cutting the sudden ringing in Graeme’s ears. The tone of her voice suggested tempering hot glass. “But we can do one. After that no guarantees but… if it does well, which we have reason to believe it might, probably we can do more.” 

“More,” said Alex, as though she had forgotten what this word meant. There was still sweat in her hair, curling at her temples. 

“I believe the standard is three; a three album contract.” 

“Oh,” said Mercedes. 

Meg’s eyebrow cocked. “Do you think you have three albums in you?” 

They all knew Alex had written more than enough songs for that many records. “We do,” Wray said. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt.” 

“Come over tomorrow,” said Mike, who seemed to have ignored all of Meg’s particulars. “When we get over our hangovers… so anytime after three…” 

Hands were shaken. The flask was emptied. All seven of them went back up to Alki Gallery together to watch Fang of the Basilisk. The competition that had fueled them earlier seemed utterly ridiculous now. Wray was drunk, perhaps not on alcohol. In the back corner of the tiny dark room he draped his entire self over Graeme like a blanket. He was so incredibly weightless and light with terrified joy that he felt, gratefully, this other weight holding him to the earth. 

“What did I tell you,” Wray said. His lips touched Graeme’s ear. He was smiling almost too much to talk without laughing. 

\--

He thought he dreamed in just snatched moments about the Eastern hills. “Sug— Graeme,” Cal said, “are you getting up.” 

He pressed his face into the pillow again. “‘m fine,” he said. He hadn’t moved in a while. His body was piecing back together. He felt Cal lie down again next to him and the back of his hand rested for a moment against Graeme’s shoulder in a gesture of solidarity, or something. When Graeme didn’t react to it (he couldn’t figure out how he was supposed to react to it) Cal moved away again. Eventually his breathing slowed and evened and Graeme got his legs under himself and knelt in the bed. Cal slept with a hand folded against the opposite shoulder, head cocked, his face bearing an expression of peaceful contemplation. The pale light from the street moved in runic patterns across his chest. _Fucking asshole_ , Graeme thought, the irony not escaping him that their sexual arrangement was usually the other way around. He got up and promptly stepped on the tied-off condom on the floor. The sensation of the disgusted and reflexive full-body cringe was so electrifying that he remembered he hadn’t come. He wondered if he did usually. This also seemed like something mildly alarming, to add to the growing compendium. 

In vengeance he took Cal’s cigarettes and lighter from the nightstand and brought them with him into the tiny filthy bathroom. The tub necessitated cleaning with magic before he dared to fill it and it took him three tries before the spell worked. Everything felt incredibly tired and slow. He ached somewhere indistinct. Eventually he drew the bath scaldingly hot and got in, washed his face and hair, lit one of the cigarettes. 

Things were fine-not-fine in the steam, nicotine, heat, the end of being drunk, the last dregs of the joint behind the Elks Club. The best thing so far about grief, he thought, was how it thoroughly steamrollered the crushing embarrassment he usually felt after sex. His head felt fuzzy. He lay back in the tub and put his shoulders underwater. The ceramic was cool as Mercedes’ touch had been against the back of his neck. Under the water his body seemed like a tool he used sometimes. 

He closed his eyes and let his mind touch it. On the day of, which was like five days previous, or his entire rememberable lifetime, or the blink of an eye, he had woken up at noon at his parents’ house, and then he had gone to Goodwill, and looked at maps and cassettes and thought about a leather jacket and a cast iron skillet, and about the show that they were playing in two weeks with Killing Curse at the Den, which was going to be the first time he was going to have to deal with Montclair since the Incident, and about the record, which was going to be done soon and then they would have to go on tour, and that he still hadn’t told his parents that he’d dropped out of college and wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the charade, and that the full moon was in nine days; in short, he had been thinking about the customary collection of things he thought about in the Time Before his brain had been shocked and expanded to the possibility that he as a human being could feel something which might possibly be named as utter scorched-earth devastation. 

At Goodwill he had bought two jazz cassettes which god knew where they were now. Then he walked up Rainier Avenue toward home. For half a block he walked backwards because Mount Rainier was out and framed artfully among the heavy low clouds, the gauzy white-grey sheaves of mist like fabric; he was hearing tones, this song he had been trying in his room for a few weeks, hummed it to himself, at a bus stop people stared, and he had thought for a precious second the way he did sometimes, I am alive in the best band in this city, I am the happiest person in the world… 

Probably this had done it. Just jinxed it or something somehow. He got to the house and there was a police car outside and the door was wide open. “Are you Graeme Sugarbush?” 

He ran down the hill helter skelter. Through the police precinct and down the stairs and into Alex’s arms because she was standing before the door which was closed and through the window in the door just a black shape like — on a surgeon’s table. Just a void. A place where something was draining through this world into another. He was trying to get through Alex and she wouldn’t let him. Eventually he realized she was speaking to him and she was saying the same thing over and over again into his ear. “It’s locked, Graeme, the door’s locked, the door’s locked, Graeme, the door’s locked — ” 

He blinked and it moved, like slides, the same light, unfocus, machine clicking, just images. They were sitting in those hideous chairs. “I knocked on the door,” Alex said, with immense calm, “to tell him that I made Bloody Marys.” 

The friendly woman detective was crouching there with them watching between their faces, wearing a mask of immense sympathy. Graeme remembered the nurse who had come into the emergency waiting room all those years ago to tell him, your friend is going to be okay. Alex was looking over this woman’s shoulder toward the door. The door which was closed. _The door’s locked._

“I went in and I could tell looking at him in the bed,” Alex said. “Then — here.” 

She took a folded piece of paper from her jeans pocket. When the detective unfolded it (pinching the edges delicately between her thumb and forefinger so as not to leave excessive fingerprints) Graeme saw his name on it and realized suddenly that everything that was happening could be real. 

“Did you read it, Alexandra?” 

“No, it’s addressed, it’s for Graeme.” 

The detective turned to him. He felt suddenly flayed. He was certain she could see inside his soul. “Graeme,” she said carefully. “This is yours. We’re just going to look at it for just a moment. We won’t read it. We’re just verifying it was written by your friend. Is that okay?” 

Something happened he didn’t think he could explain, but it felt like some piece of him stood up and walked away. Alex’s grip tightened impossibly and with her other hand she grasped his forearm. There was some grounding shock in the cold kiss of her rings. He somehow managed to corral enough of his faculties to nod. The piece of him that had walked away was at the end of the hall now slipping through the door and out the stairs. 

Next slide. Him. Corpse. Just the void which was around him like a halo. Alex shaking. “Yes that’s him.” “Wray Quincy Thorne.” Next slide. It was dark outside and they walked up the hill together toward home, which was like walking through molasses. Mercedes and Marsden were waiting there on the couch. Alex had called them on the payphone and they had come to the police station but hadn’t been let downstairs. The phone was ringing off the hook and no one seemed to hear it. “I need to lie down,” someone said. It took Graeme a moment to realize he had said it himself. 

“You can have my room,” Marsden said. 

“No, it’s — I’ll just — ” 

Next slide. The room — the rumpled sheets, the blankets. The police had taken the works as evidence. They had left everything else — the window open, and the clothes on the floor, Wray’s guitar and the overflowing ashtray on the amp in the corner… He touched the bed; it was cold. Alex was behind him in the door. If she was saying something it just sounded like static. He took his shoes off and lay down. There was a strand of Wray’s hair staticked to the flannel sheets. Some invisible battering ram weighing one thousand pounds and reinforced with iron spikes drove into his gut and through, through his spine, just dissembling. Eventually he heard Alex close the door. Either he slept or something else stood up out of him and walked away. When it came back he remembered the letter in his jeans pocket and read it. 

Is it possible to die from this, he had been thinking then. He remembered it now in the bathtub when the cigarette ashed to an ember without his noticing and burnt between his first two fingers. Is it possible for this feeling to kill you? Evidently it wasn’t, or it was taking a really long time. He thought about putting the ember of the cigarette out on his wet knee but instead he extinguished it in the water and then he lit another one. He was in process of this when someone knocked on the bathroom door. It was only Cal, naked, who coughed as he walked into the hanging smoke and steam. He looked at Graeme in the ashy tub with an expression of utter consternation and pity. “I thought you went home,” he said. He turned toward the toilet and pissed without lifting the seat. 

“Your bathtub is nicer.” 

Cal shook himself and flushed the toilet. Pointedly, he coughed again. “Are those my cigarettes?” 

“So what?” 

“So they’re my cigarettes.” He folded his arms over his chest emphatically, which was ridiculous for a half-asleep naked man. “What are you going to do now, Graeme,” he asked. 

“What do you mean, what am I going to do now.” 

“Well you have to do _something_.” 

Do I, Graeme thought, before he could stop himself. 

“Maybe you should quit drinking,” Cal said thoughtfully. “Whatever. Stop ashing in the tub.” 

Cal put the light out reflexively when he left the bathroom. Graeme sat there in the pitch dark but for the orange glow of the cigarette ember until the water was too cold to stand. “Fuck this,” he said to himself aloud. He got up and dried off and drained the tub and then he went back into Cal’s room and found the suit and his shoes on the floor, and went back out into the living room to dress. The TV, which was playing infomercials on mute, cast a brittle ersatz light which drew out the sharp edges and shadows of raised pigment in the green painting on the floor. Graeme put the rest of Cal’s cigarettes in the breast pocket of the suit, and after another thought he went to the pretty wooden box on the windowsill where Cal kept his paints, and took a neatly pre-rolled joint from the little tube where he knew Cal hid them from Laurent and Lisa. This too went in the breast pocket of the suit. There was just a little blue dawn in the window coming into the alley around the buildings. 

Grief had no shape. Almost no name. Almost no feeling. Just was. Like a black box with no edges. 

Mostly it felt like a hole which was somewhere indistinct inside him. It hurt, wherever it was, but there was really no naming where it was, or what it was, or what it looked like. It was just a wound, but it hurt everywhere, like a full body tattoo, or massive internal bleeding. Something was draining out through this hole, like his will to live or ability to perform basic functions. Mostly like his self. Like the memory of the sun. Magic, sound. The feeling in his hands. The things that were left scared him sometimes when he thought about it. Basically like a skeleton but there was flesh on it. Clothes hung off it. An emotional skeleton. 

Reality was reduced to general themes and muted colors and had collapsed somehow in its dimensionality. Nothing seemed to have much depth or nuance. Something else that had fallen out through the hole was any kind of ability or desire to interrogate the world for any secrets apart from the obvious: 

_Why?_

\--

June at the Den. When they finished playing he let the magic from the guitar back in. It was all charged up and so was he. His skin was too hot. Since the January show they had begun playing to larger and more attentive crowds of other people besides their friends, which was one of those things that seemed exciting on paper, or when you weren’t doing it. This feeling, the feeling after they played, had become incredibly difficult to process, because it was joy and pride but it was also about nine thousand other things and one of them was guilt and another one was fear. Someone whose face he couldn’t quite make out through the static cracked open a cold Rainier tallboy and pressed it into his hand. By the time he had brought his guitar and amp out to the car the beer was empty and he had somehow got another one. On stage Presto was setting up before the red moth-eaten curtains. Before they went on Clara showed Graeme and Mercedes that she and Kevin had brought a bottle of gin with them in a red cooler just to the side of the stage. So when Graeme had finished the third beer he filled the can about halfway again with gin. 

He didn’t even really know why he did things like this. In the morning he always regretted it for one reason or another, including unwise hookups, unwise stick-and-poke tattoos, incredible suffering, the uncertain knowledge he had potentially said horrible things, the certain knowledge he had definitely said horrible things, and the way all the band looked at him sometimes, and the way, to be frank, everyone in their scene looked at him sometimes, with a melange of confusion and pity. Of course these were many of the reasons why he couldn’t make it more than five minutes into any social engagement without thinking, you know what might make this easier… 

It never made anything easier. But somehow he never quite remembered that. 

When the gin was finished he was on the couch with Cal in one of the upstairs rooms smoking a joint. Because Lisa was there — she was laughing in the doorway with Kyla, wearing black wings made of pantyhose stretched over wire for some reason — Cal was being remarkably unhandsy, though he was also clearly trying to make Lisa a bit jealous because he was laughing aggressively at basically everything Graeme said, none of which was very funny, because he was shitfaced. “I see you,” Graeme said. He meant that this trick was perhaps the oldest in the book. Cal chortled like a burbling water fountain in a school gymnasium. “It's not funny,” Graeme told him. 

“You’d really be in trouble, Sugar, if you couldn’t see me,” Cal said. 

Kyla went downstairs then, because Splanchomany were about to go on, and Lisa came over to join them on the couch. Evidently she and Cal were on the outs because she sat next to Graeme instead, thus giving Cal an excuse to put his arm around Graeme and lean over his lap to ask Lisa if she had seen the latest episode of _Twin Peaks._ At last Cal wrapped his hand around Graeme’s thigh just above his knee for some reason as he asked Lisa if she thought Dr. Jacoby had killed Laura Palmer, and Graeme stood up so abruptly that his forehead cracked against Cal’s. He hardly felt it but evidently Cal did. “Ow,” he yelled, over the serpentine sounds of Kyla tuning her bass downstairs. “What the fuck — ” 

“Have to piss,” Graeme told them. He took Cal’s beer from the coffee table and found with immense relief that it had hardly been touched. He didn’t, in fact, have to piss, and anyway the line for the toilets was intimidatingly long. His mind was nearing ye olde drunk trappe which was the certainty he was being used in his every relationship. He thought perhaps he should go find Wray and watch Splanchomancy. He had found — with a great deal of practice — at shows he only really felt peaceful or safe or sane while they played or while another band played who were good enough to put his entire consciousness inside and float. So he headed for the stairs, but something blocked him. 

“Where are you going, Sugar?” 

It was Montclair. He had about six inches and seventy pounds on Graeme and whatever drugs he had been doing had put a manic glint in his eye and in his bared teeth, which were very sharp. Graeme tried to shove his way past but Montclair got him by the wrist. As in some strange terrifying dance he herded Graeme back through the handing scarves and silks separating his room from the hallway. 

He had never been in Montclair’s room before. It was where Wray had been bitten in 1985. This was not exactly the opportunity to take in the decor. Montclair’s free hand took a fist of the fabric of Graeme’s shirt and shoved him across the bare plywood floor until his back met the wall so hard the air punched out of him. Something fell to the floor and shattered. Somehow he gathered the faculties to struggle for a moment, until Montclair’s hand moved from his shirt to his throat. He felt like a bug pinned in a box by the brutal omnipotence of Montclair’s gaze. It was all he could do to squeeze his eyes shut and turn his head away, but then Montclair’s mouth and his filthy beard pressed to his ear. 

“I keep telling him,” Montclair rasped, “and he won't do shit, so now I’m telling you. Either he can do it himself, or I’ll do it.” 

Graeme twisted and got a shoulder against Montclair’s chest and shoved. This time his shoulders hit the wall harder, and the back of his head cracked against the crumbling plastery drywall so hard his vision spun. Suddenly only his toes were touching the floor. The grip against his neck pressed in tightly against all the soft machinery inside his throat. He could feel his own heartbeat slamming against Montclair’s palm. 

“He wouldn’t recognize you anymore after I was done,” Montclair went on. Graeme got a hand around his wrist and dug the bitten-down stubs of his nails in but evidently Montclair didn’t feel it. “Nobody will — not even yourself. He’ll tell you all about — ” 

Do it, Graeme tried. No sound came out, so surprisingly Montclair loosened his grip. It would probably excite him sexually to hear a litany of begs and pleas. Graeme met his hideous eyes, breathed. This time it worked: “Do it,” he said. 

There was a shift of scales in Montclair’s face. He faltered: “Are you — ”

“Fucking do it, _Bill._ Do it. I don’t fucking care.” 

It was the waxing gibbous moon outside, so an actual transference wound would be impossible. By this point Graeme had read most of the relevant literature. He also thought he had figured out the precise crux of what Montclair wanted, which was to maintain the order of a rigid hierarchy he had constructed mostly through intimidation since he had first come to Seattle, which Wray and the rest of Crucia had deigned to disrupt by daring to be better musicians. And there wasn’t much more Montclair could do to Wray, having already infected him with a destructive virus and plenty of related psychological discontents, to force him to behave according to this hierarchy. So he had turned to Graeme for leverage. But like all leverage Graeme remained useful only while he was in the balance. 

In short, Montclair would never do it, because if he did he wouldn’t be able to threaten to do it anymore. 

“I want you to,” Graeme told him. Deep enough inside, in the innermost chambers of his heart and/or soul, it wasn’t even really a lie. “I’ve always wanted you to. Come on.” 

He had not bargained on what Montclair actually did, which was reach a hand under Graeme’s shirt and gouge a chunk out, quickly, like an inoculation or a tattoo, over his ribs and under his heartbeat, with sharpened fingernails. It didn’t hurt — it was only surprising — until Montclair pressed his clammy palm over the fresh wound and the salt sweat sparked in it and behind Graeme’s eyes. The grip tightened at his throat again this time to such an extent that he couldn’t breathe. 

“A taste,” said Montclair, “did you like it?” 

His ears were ringing and things were turning black at the corners. He forced a nod. 

“Next time,” he said. He pressed his crotch against Graeme’s thigh. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, was most horrifying. “I’m coming for — ” 

“ _CRUCIO_!” 

Montclair stiffened like a man possessed. Graeme wrenched the weakened grip from his throat. Oxygen felt and tasted like pure blue flame just scorching inside him and with the breath came the sudden burning pain of the wound in his side. His knees buckled. Montclair took two staggering backwards steps away from him and then collapsed to the floor. Behind him in the doorway was Wray, with his wand out. His lips were pursed so thin and white they were almost invisible in his face. Every slight drawn-tight fiber of his being focused into his eyes and though his eyes into the wand into the spell. Downstairs the sound of Splanchomancy’s first song vibrated up through the floor, metallic, heavy, hideous, shaking the plywood walls, and something about it seemed to conduct and compliment Montclair’s grotesque writhing. He was like a slug trying to escape salt. 

Graeme had never seen the spell performed before, perhaps ironically given they had named the band after it. It was quieter than he had expected. Montclair’s shirt rode up showing the bad tattoos and scars across his hairy belly. “Wray,” Graeme tried. His voice death-rattled in his aching throat. 

Wray looked up at him with an expression on his face Graeme had never seen. It was beyond anger, or vengeance, both of which were mildly familiar. It was along those lines but further, and there was no name for it. He could not shake the sudden understanding that it was not quite a human rage. This time when he tried Wray’s name it made no sound at all. 

Somehow this of all things seemed to shake Wray back to himself. He lifted his wrist and as such the spell. On the floor Montclair’s gasping breath was audible even above the sounds of the band, like a struggling beached whale. “ _Petrificus totalus_ ,” Wray said. His voice was shocked calm. 

Ross's vocal floated up through the floorboards and shifted the fabrics in the door like an evil wind. Just a long, processed-sounding scream. All of a sudden Graeme’s knees didn't hold him anymore. He could smell his own blood. He fell on his ass on the floor and Wray practically dove across the prone body between them and tumbled into his arms. He smelled like stale weed smoke and laundry detergent and old sweat and spilled beer and the force of his embrace was like being shoved into the wall all over again only this time welcome, warm, reflexive, with a palpable something: relief, love… Either Wray too was wildly shaking or it was a kind of transference, and he was saying over and over again the same thing into Graeme’s ear: “What happened, what happened, what happened, what happened…” 

“He cut — don’t look at it now.” He was watching over Wray’s shoulder at Montclair on the floor unmoving except for breath. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said. 

“Do what?” 

“That spell.” 

“You just have to mean it,” Wray said. He pulled away just enough that Graeme could see his hands were trembling like large white moths. The rage had drained from his eyes and left behind a manic energy. “Let me look,” he whispered. 

“Wray — ”

“It’s okay,” Wray said. He tugged a little at Graeme’s left forearm which he’d pressed against the wound. “It’s where mine — ” 

Something in his voice fell off a shelf inside of him. Or otherwise something stood up and walked away. 

“ — where mine is,” he finished. 

It was too late, his heart was broken, it was over now, there was no going back, and _you were supposed to protect him from this…_

“I’m sorry,” Graeme whispered. There was almost no voice left. He let Wray pull his arm away from the wound. It was smeared with bright-dark blood all up his wrist and the palm of his hand and the sleeve of his flannel shirt. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry.” 

“Why are you sorry,” Wray said. His voice was very soft and almost incredibly gentle. With the care of a nurse or a florist he pulled the collar of the flannel off Graeme’s shoulder on the wounded side. Where he had pressed his arm against the wound there was a vivid tannic wash of blood staining his t-shirt the color of the sky while it rained at night in the winter. Deep, deep shadowy red in the windowless darkness. “It’s not your fault,” Wray told him. He almost believed it. “Can you hold on if I side-along you.” 

“Yeah, I think.” 

“Yeah or you think.” 

“Yeah, yes, I can — ” 

Wray’s magic shoved them forth into space together like a hook around their backs in a cartoon and landed them clumsily in the concealed nook under the porch behind the house they all used for this precise purpose. Graeme’s knees still wouldn’t hold him and he stumbled into a stack of lawn chairs before Wray could help him up, and their neighbors’ dog started rhythmically barking. With Graeme’s arm around Wray’s shoulders they struggled up the alleyway between the houses toward the bleary streetlight. Down below on Twelfth Avenue through the thick foliage between the houses a group of Muggle kids about their age went by laughing into the still summer night. 

“You got everything,” Wray asked. He meant of all Graeme’s limbs. 

“I got everything.” 

“What record do you want to put on when we get inside.” 

“Galaxie 500.” 

“Which one?” 

“You pick.” 

“Well obviously if I pick it’s going to be _On Fire._ ” 

He was trying desperately for levity but it only sounded stilted and painful. Graeme’s heart twisted. They stumbled together through the door into the homey-smelling darkness — weed, paints, dust, rain, yesterday’s baking — and down the hall in the streetlight through the window. 

“Want a cookie,” said Wray, in the least inviting tone with which Graeme had ever been offered a cookie. He flicked the light on in the bathroom, where Alex’s makeup was still spread out on the makeshift plywood vanity. There was a little powder foundation in the sink, old haircut scraps, toothpaste. “Alex and I made them yesterday,” he said. 

“What are they?” 

“Thumbprint ones with blackberry jelly.” 

“Um, maybe later…” 

Wray closed the toilet seat and sat Graeme down on it and went to put on the Galaxie 500 record. The fluorescent light above the vanity was blinding in its intensity and when Graeme took off his flannel and t-shirt the light made the blood seem bloodier and his skin seem bleached-out, like salt against the digging gouging wounds. Open, flesh pulling away from blood, like sleeping mouths. Logically he knew it looked worse than it probably was but alcohol and blood loss had wreaked havoc with the logic. There was a great rusty stain of dried flaky blood like a smear of watercolor from his underarm to the waist of his jeans and the wound itself — or rather wounds, plural, four, deep rounded furrows, inflamed and stinging, paralleling the inward tucking movement of his ribs — seeped this dark black stuff. He knew from cleaning Wray up at first when it had been really bad that blood always looked unusually dark when there was a lot of it. But this too had been swept under the rug with the logic. 

He heard the music on the turntable and then Wray’s footsteps in the kitchen. “Don’t say anything,” he said. He wasn’t thinking. He regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth but either Wray didn’t notice or didn’t care. He crouched beside Graeme, knees cracking, kicking aside the ruined clothes. When he had gone into the other room he had put down the necessary thing in order to be able to reckon logically (the damn logic again) with what to do; it was in his eyes, or rather they were missing some particular shade. 

Wray reached as if to touch the wound but then he stopped. “What’s the spell you do with the weight of air…” 

“ _Aer pulvinus_ ,” said Graeme. “It’s the spell you would use if you were being hanged.” 

“Really?” 

“It’s like a pillow of air to hold you up — but Wray, you should do _Caestu_ first.” 

“What’s that?” 

“Latin for _glove_.” 

Wray did the spells and went rummaging in the cabinet under the vanity for the dittany they kept around for drunken falls and spell accidents. His magic against the wound was cool and clean as rain. Wounds inflicted by a werewolf could not be cured by magical means. One could only disinfect them and stop the bleeding with pressure, as Graeme had been doing for Wray on the sidewalk outside the transformation cells at Seventh and Weller since 1985. 

“Did you get a test,” Wray said into the cabinet. 

“Did I — no. Not — I’m going to.” 

He surfaced with the little eyedropper bottle of dittany and a few cotton balls and knelt next to Graeme again. “You can get one at Planned Parenthood at Twentieth and Madison,” he said, pointedly not meeting Graeme’s eyes. The liquid in the bottle he dripped into the pristine cotton was so old it had gone yellowish, though it didn’t exactly matter if it had denatured or whatnot as the wounds would scar for the rest of Graeme’s life no matter what interventions were taken. “There’s a witch nurse and you use a special code word,” Wray went on. “We can go tomorrow.” 

“I’ll go on Monday.” 

“You’ve been saying that for months and months.” 

The dittany stung when Wray pressed it against the wounds, and his hands were warm and trembling. The pressure had slowed the bleeding somewhat but the liquid spread in the old blood and made it appear almost redder, like rose petals. Wray Vanished all the blood and made another pass with a fresh cotton ball. Then he went digging in the cabinet again for gauze and tape. 

“Do you not trust me,” Graeme said while he was turned away. Perhaps another function of the alcohol and blood loss but also he had been generally wondering. New blood pressed out of the growing red-black bruise into the wounds and stuck — like the tide coming in and filling the high pools. 

Wray threw a roll of tape out from under the sink so hard that it hit the wall behind him and rolled to Graeme’s feet. “To take care of yourself?” he asked lightly. 

It was all in all a very kind and like-Wray way to say, you failed where it was most important. On the stereo Dean and Naomi and Damon played “Another Day.” _Why do you cry today just because the sky is gray…_

“There’s no gauze,” Wray said, standing. His knees cracked, like two bullets in close succession. He wouldn’t quite look Graeme in the eye. He went into the kitchen to get the cheesecloth and then he flipped the record, because it had gotten to the end of the side, and Graeme bit his lip as hard as he could until it burst blood in his mouth. It was something else entirely to taste it. When Wray came back he lifted the _aer pulvinus_ spell unspeaking and taped the cheesecloth over the wounds. “How about you go lie down,” he said. 

Graeme went to Wray’s room and took his shoes off and put on one of Wray’s ratty band shirts from the floor. Eventually he lay in the bed. When he closed his eyes nothing was spinning anymore. It almost didn’t hurt yet. There was only the beginning of the future-memory of pain like waking up from a dream of childhood. The guilt was something else — pure rich nausea twisting like a black snake. Out in the kitchen Wray had got Alex on the two-way mirror. He must have been pacing because Graeme could only hear snatches of conversation when he was closest to the bedroom door. 

“Upstairs in Montclair’s room… tell Marsden to bring over… took him home… sleep it off for a while…” 

He turned over onto the hurt side and watched out the window at the bamboo moving in the night breeze trying to imagine what would happen from here in a rapidly mutating gaseous black cloud of nightmare scenarios. It was perfectly legal in America to perform an Article D curse ( _Imperius, Crucio_ , and related, along with select uses of _Obliviate_ and numerous injurious hexes), especially as an act of defense. The issue was the extrajudicial judgement that would certainly be performed by Montclair, and which was likely already in planning stages. At first he thought his throat was hurting out of pressure to cry (frustration, pain, sleeplessness, old fear, drunken melancholy) before he remembered in a quick terrifying flash on the edge of sleep the precise sensation of the meaty hand around his neck… 

It startled him when Wray came in a few minutes later. “Sorry,” he said, silhouetted like some evil visitant in the door. 

“It’s alright.” 

“Mars’s coming home with something for your throat,” Wray told him, sitting on the edge of the bed. In the thin light his eyes were wide and bright and yearning. He reached for Graeme again but seemed to think better of it at the last moment. “It’s starting to bruise now.” 

Say what you’re thinking to me once for the love of god, Graeme thought, almost said; I can take it.

“Scoot over,” Wray said. 

“What?” It surprised him after the conversation in the bathroom and everything he had been thinking in the interim. But he was already doing it, shifting back toward the window. 

Wray undid his boots and belt and threw the latter on the floor where the buckle clattered against the hardwoods, and then he lay down and wrestled halfway under one of the colorful wool throws his mom had made for him while she was in chemotherapy. A car went by on the street and in the strange filmic pass of light Graeme realized that Wray’s eyes were red just so in the corners.

“I’m sorry I said — like everything I said,” Wray told him, “It’s not your fault. I’m so sorry. I’m just — ” 

He stopped, as though whatever he was could not necessarily be articulated. This was fine, Graeme thought, with a horrible relief, with the guilt unspooling; this was what he did, this was what he was good at, now, after all these years, and maybe the only thing, or at least the most important thing; the thing by which he had, for better or worse, defined who he was, by the perfect whim of fate… “It’s okay,” he said, not sure if it was true, not caring if it was true. “It’s over and it’s alright.” 

“I thought. You were like, limp, how he was holding you.” 

“He wouldn’t really do anything,” Graeme told him, knowing even through the fog that this was a lie now. “He just wants — ”

“I used _Crucio_ on him,” Wray said, as though he were just remembering. 

“I’m sorry — ”

“I would do it again. He cut you — you’re going to have a scar forever because of m- ” 

“— because of him.” 

He leaned toward Wray and embraced him. It was awkward in the bed. Eventually he felt Wray’s skinny arms around his back and then the shaking broke into something else which was bigger. Seismic washing weeping with almost no sound. He held on as tightly as he could, thinking of Janet and Tam Lin. “I'm sorry,” Wray choked, under his ear, “oh my god, I’m so sorry.” 

\---

\--

-

II. 

The Den was in Eastlake, blocked from view of the elevated I-5 by a bank of struggling pines. On the way down the hill from Cal’s Graeme stopped at the diner for coffee, which he drank quickly enough to feel as though he had shot caffeine directly to the vein. It was still raining. 

All five of them had grown up coming to the Den together. It was where everything happened. When they were fourteen it had seemed like the coolest place in the world and the bastion of all creativity of any importance and the only kind of magic worth practicing. Shortly thereafter it all had begun to transform (like so much else) into the kind of battleground where they and a few others would wrestle to hash out dominance in twenty-minute sets of squalling noise. It had been enemy territory since 1985, because Montclair and his bands always lived there, above the cramped performance space in a serpentine layout of squalid magically-extended lofts, crawling with silverfish, where you could always hear heroin crackling in a spoon or someone crying. That had never really stopped them from going, though perhaps it should have. 

The Den’s outer facade was a boarded storefront wedged between two bars and spelled to appear abandoned even to a wizard’s eyes. The plywood nailed over the front window had been thoroughly graffitied with Muggle and magical tags, and the sidewalk was carpeted in cigarette butts. Down at the docks on Lake Union a few blocks away the dockworkers had begun to arrive for their shifts; the long low distant sounds of ships’ bells and foghorns sounded musical, or like speech… Otherwise nothing and no one was moving in the entire neighborhood, because it was five AM. 

The door was magicked pretty simply; the knob would appear when you touched a particular patch of graffiti under the boarded window. Graeme knocked for about ten minutes before anyone answered. He steeled himself when he heard the light footsteps and series of unlocking charms from inside but the person who developed like a photograph out of the interior darkness when the door opened was only Lockett Schaff.

“Graeme,” he said tiredly, pulling the ratty yellow-and-blue flannel closer around himself against the morning chill. His voice sometimes seemed to not really work, which was evidently a less-discussed side effect of opiate addiction. 

“Is Montclair here.” 

Schaff looked him over as though to ascertain if he was serious, so Graeme put his hands, which were shaking, probably because of the coffee on an empty stomach, though possibly also because of the lack of sleep, forthcoming hangover, and inability to remember the last time he had eaten anything, in the pockets of the suit pants. There were papers in there he hadn’t noticed before — Wray’s fucking used tissues and a guitar pick and what felt like a dollar bill. At last Schaff pushed the door open wide and Graeme ducked in under his raised arm. “We cancelled the show,” Schaff said. He was locking the door again. Perhaps if Graeme had had more of his faculties about him it would have felt like being sealed as a human sacrifice in a tomb with a godly mummified king. 

“I thought it was your album release.” 

He actually knew this for a fact, because they had agreed to the show having worked out new songs and a Wipers cover (“Romeo”) and knowing they could upstage Killing Curse at their own house on the night of their own album release gig. Basically it had been Wray’s ultimate revenge. After the Incident it had also become Graeme’s ultimate revenge. As was customary — with the guilt growing by increments every moment he thought about it — they had dragged the rest along with them. 

Schaff, as was also customary, had asked them to play to begin with. “Splanchomancy dropped out too,” he said; “everyone’s taking stock of reality.” 

“Are they,” said Graeme. 

Schaff looked him over again in the wan light from the bare bulbs in the hallway. For a moment his brow furrowed a bit, sympathetically, in a familiar expression Graeme was already extremely tired of, and he looked like he was going to try for some platitudes. Instead, thankfully, he said, “He’s upstairs.” 

“Alright.” 

“Room at the end of the — ” 

“I know which room, Schaff.” 

He felt not much. Not even fear, nor nostalgia — even the deep ache of heart and bones had shifted itself somewhere else for now. The manic sort of flame lit in him with Cal’s words had been bolstered by the coffee and now it struck through him and roared consuming all else before it. He figured nothing Montclair could do to him now could possibly be worse. 

The stairs were dark and narrow, and even in the early day, faded out into a perpetual dusk in this place where neither time nor light moved, it seemed rather surprising that they led upward. At the top there was just an edge of light coming in on the floor through a boarded window. The halls were floored in cheap plywood painted red, lined by rooms on either side which were held together almost entirely with magic, most with no doors, smoke filtering out, the smell of incense and numerous competing and nausea-inducing drug perfumes, palo santo, sage, blood, all of it dawn-silent, the quietest he had ever heard the building, so uncanny he wondered if he’d gone suddenly deaf. Then the room at the end of the hall with the scarves hung in the door. Where he had been before. Where it had all begun. 

He raised his hand and rapped gently on the plywood wall beside the scarves. Politesse immediately seemed utterly ridiculous so he turned his fist and pounded on the wall for good measure. From another room down the hall someone loudly groaned to be so stirred from sleep. “Who’s there,” came Montclair’s woozy half-asleep rasp from beyond the scarves. 

Graeme stepped through in lieu of answer, brandishing the joint from his pocket as a peace offering. The man himself was in his bed, which was essentially a pile of filthy blankets and a mostly-deflated air mattress on the floor. He had propped himself on his elbows, shirtless, a little uncomfortably un-high, to greet the intruder; when he saw it was only Graeme he laid back down again. “Sugar,” he said, unsurprisedly. 

“Hi, Bill.” 

“Come to challenge me to a duel or something?” 

Graeme looked around for a chair or something but there were none. The room was strewn with clothing and beer cans and garbage and smelled like old vomit and older smoke and even older death. Rot and rain. There was a little light coming in through a high window which seemed to cower in the darkness. Just beneath Graeme’s feet was an auspicious red stain redder even than the chipped paint smeared over the plywood. He stepped away from it toward Montclair and sat cross-legged on the floor, taking Cal’s lighter from his pocket too. “Why would I do that,” he asked. 

“I don’t know, vengeance?” 

“I don’t want vengeance,” said Graeme. “And I would kill you instantly in a duel. Where would be the fun in that.” 

This seemed to put enough fire under Montclair to get him out of bed. Standing he towered over Graeme. In the pale light the scar that was his own transference wound from decades previous was just visible, stretched and sharp white as bone against his skin. It was almost as intricate as a tattoo. It was nothing like Wray’s had been. “You really think — ” 

“I know so,” Graeme told him. “Want to hit this with me?” 

He didn’t think he had ever seen any feeling in the strange, grizzled face before. Something moved through the dark eyes and heavy brow. Maybe just confusion. He held the joint up and Montclair took it. After a hit he sat back down in his bed again. “Where’d you get this?” 

“From a friend.” 

“It’s good shit.” 

“He won’t tell me where he gets it,” said Graeme, though this wasn’t true; Cal got it from Laura, who had gone to school with Graeme and Wray at Denny Academy and grew marijuana plants now in a greenhouse out by Cle Elum. 

He gestured for the joint back and Montclair gave it. “What are you doing here, Sugar,” he said. 

“I wanted to talk to you.” 

“Even after — ”

“You have no reason to do anything now,” Graeme said, with the smoke. The trouble with having forgotten to eat for several days was that just about any drug you did went directly to your head, he was realizing. 

“Who says?” 

“I don’t fucking care, then. If you’ve changed your mind. If it wasn’t enough — if it wasn’t what you wanted in the end.” 

Montclair’s face twisted into a familiar smirk. “So you came to offer — ” 

“I came to ask you why.” 

This seemed to give him pause, in that it startled the smirk from his face. He was watching up over Graeme’s head into the corner of the room as though there were some message there. The joint burned down and dropped ash he seemed not to notice into his lap before he answered. “You suppose there is a _why_ ,” he said. 

“There has to be a why.” 

Montclair smirked. Something inside Graeme’s chest turned cold and fell. With an unfamiliar air of introspection, as though he were trying to figure out where to begin, Montclair took another hit off the joint and passed it back. “Lockett and I grew up together in western Idaho,” he said, “did you know that?” 

“Of course I did.” 

“We’re from a town called Riggins on the Salmon River. If you’ve ever driven like from Pullman to Boise — ”

“We were going to when we went on tour,” Graeme told him pointedly. 

“It’s a bad place,” Montclair said. “A nothing place. Never go there.” 

“Is that where — ”

“Where I got bit and then where I bit Lockett, yes.” 

“Who bit you?” 

“My father. He was a drunk — almost as bad as you. He went away for a while and then came back and when he came back…” 

“Should’ve fucking known it was your daddy issues,” said Graeme. 

Logically he knew this was like baiting a savage animal, but the logic had long since disappeared along with numerous other faculties. And anyway, it worked — Montclair lunged for him, half standing, hand outstretched for his throat. It wrapped tightly around Graeme’s neck again, like in the old groove from the last time, and pulled him to his feet. “What did you fucking say,” Montclair growled. Their faces were very close. There was a vein bulging almost comically in the temple. 

“Daddy — issues — ” Graeme choked. 

Montclair shook him by the neck like a chicken he was trying to strangle. “What do you fucking know about anything!” There were woozy little stars filtering in through the bright window in the corner of Graeme’s vision. Still he could hear the note of hurt in Montclair’s snarl and knew he’d touched the right nerve. “Fucking — rich pure-blood human boy — you’ll never fucking understand — ” 

He’d said more than he wanted to; there was a sudden strike of regret in the terrible black eyes. Vengefully his hand tightened at Graeme’s neck. He could hardly see anything anymore but the spreading light, and every last functioning brain cell begged him to fight back just enough to breathe. And yet he knew he couldn’t. It was some other demon iteration of the pure survival-mind which reminded him he would never get anything out of Montclair if he put up a fight. And besides he had long since figured Montclair didn’t want or couldn’t bear to kill anyone by his own hand — he wanted his enemies to live in as much pain as possible, for as long as possible, as prolonged a torture as could be borne, until they decided to end it themselves… 

He must have communicated something just in their eye contact or through spiritus mundi. Montclair dropped him suddenly like something hot. Graeme’s knees buckled and he staggered a few steps back. The blood and oxygen coming back from where it had been driven away turned his vision to shades of black and grey. He tried to measure and even his breaths but he sounded like a dying fish, choking air. Montclair for his part crouched on the floor to pick up the still-burning ember of the joint and sat back in his bed again, crossing his legs like a prayerful mystic. 

“My father made a terrible werewolf,” Montclair said, continuing the reflective monologue as though he had not just been holding Graeme in the air by the larynx. He pinched the clip of the joint between his thumb and fingernail, like some demonic Heathcliffian foundling sipping tea from a bone china cup in a bourgeois parlor. “Everyone he turned was by accident when he was drunk. He killed some people too, at first, you know. Most werewolves do. But that was also by accident.” 

“Did you turn Schaff by accident,” Graeme rasped. He had sat back down again, further from Montclair this time. 

“No.” Montclair finished the joint and flicked the butt across the room. “I planned it.” 

“You _planned_ — ”

“You think I just — no way. It’s deliberate.” 

“You can control it?” 

“To some extent.” 

“How?” 

Montclair smirked. “Come here on the full moon. I’ll teach you.” 

“Very funny.” 

“I don’t know, Sugar,” Montclair said. His smirk grew and changed, showing a few sharp front teeth, but the expression did not quite reach his eyes. “You’d probably make a better werewolf than Thorne did.” 

He hadn’t yet invoked Wray by name. Graeme’s heart dropped and skittered, as Montclair had probably known it would. 

“He wasn’t who you thought,” Montclair said, now that the hour had come round at last. 

Graeme sealed his shaking hands into fists so tight they hurt and hid them in the pockets of the coat with Wray’s bloody tissues. “How so.” 

“They usually put us near each other down in the cells. You don’t really know someone until you see them in that kind of state.” 

“Everyone’s different under stress,” said Graeme, trying to keep all feeling out of his voice. 

“It never pissed you off that he tended to make everything about himself?” 

“No,” Graeme lied. 

“You have larger destiny than sideman, Sugar.” 

“I doubt it.” 

“I don’t.” Montclair fixed Graeme with the dark eyes. He looked a different sort of predatory than usual. “You’d make a good werewolf. I kept telling him.” 

“You’ve said that.” 

“He wanted to, you know.” 

“No, he didn’t — ”

“He did. Maybe in the other part of his mind. But it’s no different — no less real.” 

I think it knows you, Wray had told him. They were both very stoned, sitting in the dark on the sagging couch in the front room on 13th Avenue listening to the Velvet Underground’s _Loaded_. I think it knows you, Wray had said, very carefully, like he was walking around a deep hole, I think it would recognize you, I don’t think I, whatever me, I don’t think I would ever hurt you. 

“You don’t mind blacking yourself out, Sugar,” Montclair went on. “You do it all the time on your own. You forfeit control to your subconscious whenever possible. So you already know what it’s for.” 

“What is it for,” Graeme asked. Nearly knowing but needing to hear it aloud in this other voice. 

“You tell me,” said Montclair. “Why do you drink.” 

“It’s different.” 

“Is it?” 

There was a sudden sound in the door, which roused Graeme’s fight-or-flight reflex. But it was only Schaff. “You’re both still alive,” he said, with a flat ersatz surprise. He had pushed the scarves aside to lean against the plywood doorframe, skinny arms crossed over his chest. Graeme had never seen him in anything less than a long-sleeve flannel, and it was quickly apparent why: his left arm, from wrist past elbow until it disappeared into his shirtsleeve, looked as though he had long ago shoved it into a Muggle garbage disposal. There was an edge of a wry smile, which Graeme had also never seen before, sitting in his narrow mouth. 

“Mind your own fucking business,” Montclair rasped. Schaff put his hands up and retreated through the membrane of the scarves into the hallway again. But Montclair shouted his name after him: “Lockett!” 

Schaff peeked back in through the colorful silks. In the shadow the starved-sharp angles of his face gave him a regal cast, like a romantically ill gentleman of property brought home from Oxford by brocade-curtained horse-drawn carriage to die. “What.” 

“Have you got any junk left.” 

Schaff’s eyes met Graeme’s for a moment, but whatever he was trying to communicate was indecipherable. Then he fixed Montclair again. “I guess you want some.” 

“I mean — ”

“What are you gonna do for me.” 

“You know I’ll get you back, asshole.” 

Schaff looked again between Graeme and Montclair. Even his eyes seemed to move uncannily slowly. “Fine,” he said. “Graeme — ”

“I don’t want anything.” 

“I was going to offer you a beer.” 

By now perhaps it was six in the morning. “Okay,” Graeme said. “Thanks.” 

Schaff disappeared again into the hallway. “He hasn’t been the same since he got sick,” Montclair said, loudly and pointedly enough for Schaff to hear. 

“Sick?” 

“He’s got HIV. It isn’t AIDS yet but he acts like he’s on his deathbed.” Graeme was going to say something like, you can’t blame him for being a little shellshocked after being infected with another debilitating fatal lifetime disease. But Montclair kept talking: “He’s been even worse since we found out about Thorne.” 

“What? Why?” 

“He _respected_ you both.” As though the notion itself were worthy of disgust. “He said you were an iconic guitar duo like Verlaine and Lloyd. Besides he’s been in one of those introspective moods since the diagnosis. But it’s been going on and on…” 

“You guys have been friends for a long time,” Graeme said. 

“Maybe friends is the wrong word. When you’ve been in bands with someone so long, lived with them, spent every hour of the day with them — ” And, unsaid, Graeme thought, mutilated and mutated them, seemingly repeatedly, with your teeth — “it’s really not friendship anymore, is it — but you know that.” 

“More like brothers,” Graeme said. The truth was, as the only child his parents could afford, he wasn’t sure what it was like to have a sibling. Wray, as the only child his hippie mother had divined in a teacup as a teenager, hadn’t been sure either. 

“Maybe like brothers who hate each other,” Montclair said, pointedly again, toward the door. It seemed he had sensed some movement in the hall because Schaff slipped in again through the hanging scarves. “Would you say that's what we are, Lockett.” 

“Brothers who hate each other?” Schaff gave Graeme a cold Rainier tallboy, unopened, and another indecipherable look whose pointedness matched the black dagger messily tattooed across the back of his wrist. “I don’t know,” he said to Montclair, palming over a tiny plastic bag. 

“Well then what would you say — ”

“I would just say you’re the singer and I’m the guitar player, Bill.” Having been in a similar relationship — with Alex — Graeme understood the symbolic heft. Montclair seemed not to. “Enjoy, you two,” Schaff said, retreating toward the door again. 

“You’re not going to push off with us?” Montclair asked, scrounging on the floor around the deflated bed, evidently for the necessary materials. Graeme cracked the Rainier can, which frothed around the tab, wondering how much of this beer he would have to get through and how quickly in order to depress his stoned nerves enough to not have a panic attack at the sight of Montclair shooting heroin. “Come on, Lockett,” Montclair said. 

“I’m alright.” 

“You don’t look alright.” 

Schaff ignored this. “I’m going back to bed,” he said. 

“Suit yourself,” said Montclair as Schaff disappeared. He’d found the shortbread tin containing his works under a pile of shirts on the floor and had begun to unpack the necessary items and arrange them around himself on the floor in a kind of ritual formation. Graeme made it through half the Rainier before he had to quit for fear of puking. He pressed the cold can against his throat and looked away across the room, where assorted posters from long-ago shows had rolled up against the plywood walls and the red paint had bleached in the sun. “You can watch,” Montclair said. There was a swallowed laugh in the rasping voice. “I don’t mind.” 

It was like looking into the sun. He forced himself to focus through the chorus of screaming in his mind which reminded him that this was precisely what Wray had been doing in his last moments. Montclair had emptied the bag Schaff had given him into the well of a filthy metal spoon. 

“Here’s what your problem is,” Montclair said. He struck the wheel of his black lighter three times before it caught and set the liquids and solids in the spoon bubbling together like a child’s chemistry experiment. “You need everything to have an answer.” 

“So?” 

“Well what if there isn’t one? Where does that leave you? I guess it leaves you where you are now.” 

“There has to be — ”

“There isn't a fucking reason, idiot. There’s no answer! That’s what I’m trying to get through your thick skull.” 

“But you said you planned — ”

“I did.” 

“So why — why did you plan for them in particular? Why did you plan for Wray in particular?” 

Montclair inspected the liquid in the spoon and appeared satisfied. He took a syringe in a plastic packet from the shortbread tin and opened the packaging with his teeth. All of a sudden Graeme thought he heard drums from somewhere, slow plodding drums, like the beat of a death march. 

“Fuckin’ beats me, Sugar,” Montclair said. 

Graeme stood, dropping the half-finished beer on the floor, where it spilled in a frothy puddle about the smeared red paint and blood. His vision spun. 

“You better go ask Lockett if you want some,” Montclair went on, ignoring the spilled beer. He was flicking the side of the syringe with the bruised nail of his pointer finger to settle the air bubbles inside. The casual tone of his voice drew a sharp contrast with the expression on his face, which had sharpened and tightened with a fixated longing. “I’ll cook it up for you if you want. If he gives you any shit I’ll go in there myself and take it from him so just — ”

“No.” 

“No what?” 

“That’s not fucking good enough!” 

“Well if heroin isn’t good enough for you Royce usually has unicorn blood.” 

“That’s not — you know what I fucking mean, Bill.” 

The drums must have only been his heartbeat, because they had sped up now. The low bass tone like demonic footsteps on the stairs shaking and echoing inside his skull. Montclair held the syringe between two fingers and with his free hand and teeth wrapped a rubber strap about his upper arm to draw out the struggling blue vein inside his elbow. 

This had been the end of Wray. His last movements. He had written the note already and left it at the bedside. The sound of the rain against the bamboo outside. Perhaps he also had been hearing the same drums. 

“Maybe look at your life,” Montclair said, once the strap was pulled tight, “and think about why you expect the world to make sense to you.” 

The needle broke the skin. Graeme squeezed his eyes shut and looked away. 

He had known it was too much; he had calculated. Probably he had just laid down. By that point probably there was not much of him left. It was separating from him bit by bit and shifting elsewhere, beyond the veil of fog, outside this world. The way it happened was that you just stopped breathing. 

Something thumped, and Graeme opened his eyes, startled. It was Montclair, who had seized and rolled off the mattress to the plywood floor, where his body twitched and heaved the way it had under Wray’s curse that night in June. So like this way, in fact, that Graeme turned toward the silks in the door in search of the culprit. Indeed, Schaff was standing there, though he didn’t have a wand out. His arms were folded over his chest again and he was watching past Graeme at Montclair with an intensity that could’ve flattened a small city. 

Graeme knew enough about how heroin worked to know this wasn’t the desired effect. His mind, pathetically, was filtering healing spells for some reason. As if sensing this, Schaff came closer, planting his inconsiderable frame as a kind of gestural shield between Graeme and the giant heaving body on the floor. It seemed not to have much life about it anymore aside from a sort of compulsory electric reaction. 

Graeme realized what he had been trying or meaning to say was, aren’t you going to help him? It seemed like the right thing to say in these sorts of situations, if there was a right thing, but even if he had meant it, which he wasn’t sure he did, it would just have been a sort of symbol. 

At last it stopped. Certainly it was only an it now. Schaff darted forward and took hold of the meaty, hairy wrist and jammed his fingers under the sweaty leather watchband where the pulse would/should be. Graeme covered his mouth with his hand. This also seemed like the proper gesture. It was all too quick and he was already too utterly fried to process enough to feel anything about what had just happened. Not even nausea. 

Schaff dropped Montclair’s arm. When he stood his knees cracked. If he were a different sort of person he might’ve dusted his hands off. The light moved through the high windows over the tearing spiraling scars, the sharp black tattoos, his angular face, still bearing that swallowed, knife-sharp edge of a smile, or a grimace, more in the eyes than in the mouth, and determination, and most of all relief. 

“I didn’t mean for you to see that,” he said, “but I bet it felt good, right?” 

Graeme’s mouth, which was agape without his having realized, made a movement around a word which was perhaps just _What?_

“I hope you got what you came for out of him,” Schaff went on. He backed away from the body, as though it might come to life again if he wasn’t looking at it, and stood beside Graeme. The single gesture marring his apparently permanent expression of blitzed-out cool was that his hands were sealed in white-knuckle fists partially hidden by his crossed arms. “Did you?” 

“I — I mean I guess — aren’t you going to call the police or something?” 

“Why would I do that,” Schaff said. “Royce’ll find him. We should go.” 

“Aren’t they going to be able to see — ”

“No one in their right mind is going to do necromancy on a notorious junkie’s overdose corpse,” Schaff explained. He sounded awfully sure of himself. “Let’s go. Have you had breakfast?” 

“What!” 

“You look hungry.” 

“Well I’m not.” 

He had never spoken so much in one sitting to Schaff before. He was more animated than Graeme had expected. To wit, he gave Graeme a furrowed-brow skeptical look which made the severe face seem belonging to a different person. One with feelings. “We’re going to get breakfast,” he said. “Come on.” 

Shell-shocked, Graeme followed him out through the hanging silks. At the end of the hall Schaff slipped through a similar membrane, a lacy blue Goodwill curtain strung up in a crooked plywood doorframe, into another inner sanctum which Graeme realized must be his room. It was even more spartan than Montclair’s had been, and there was no window. A bare bulb hanging overhead was extinguished. The bed had a frame, but that was the extent of the improved amenities. The bedside table was littered with trash, including a few orange pill bottles and unused insulin needles in plastic sheaths, and a few records were scattered on the floor, of which Graeme only recognized one: the first album by Judee Sill. Schaff retrieved his leather jacket from the end of the bed, and then he herded Graeme down the stairs and outside. On the street, with the door locked behind them, Graeme felt like he could breathe for the first time in his life. Schaff watched him, settling the jacket over his narrow shoulders. “Why does he love choking you,” he wondered aloud. 

“What?” 

“Your neck’s bruised again.” 

“I said he had daddy issues,” Graeme recalled, as though it had happened in another world. 

“The unspeakable truth,” said Schaff. He set off, shoulders hunched against the wind, toward the Denny overpass, and Graeme followed. “Did he give you the ‘my dad was a terrible werewolf’ monologue.” 

“He did.” 

“Yeah, it’s his favorite…” 

The fog had moved low against the highway and the hills, a portent of more rain coming. Schaff, with his hands in his pockets, watched intently at the white-grey blanket of it moving, brow still furrowed. “What did you give him,” Graeme asked. 

“Same as always but _this_ much more potent,” Schaff said, measuring a scant distance between his thumb and forefinger. “The thing is, getting as close as possible to death without dying. So it’s easy to make a mistake — people do it all the time. And sometimes they don’t mean to do it, because sadists love to cut heroin with other sorts of things. But all this is politics. Whatever.” 

“So that’s what happened to Wray.” 

“Well, he did it on purpose — ”

“But that’s how he died.” 

Schaff looked at Graeme, expression shifting again to the sympathetic. “Yeah, that’s how he died.” 

“It was — ”

“It looks terrible but — it feels like falling and heaven catches you.” 

“Really?” 

“Yes.” 

“How do you know?” 

“Graeme, I’ve OD’d like… at least five times.” 

“But — ”

“I saw death — the gates and everything, like the Rose-Kenworthy Theory. So I can confirm that’s true. Then Montclair shoved ice cubes up my ass.” 

“That works?” 

“I don’t know, sometimes…” 

They waited at the corner of Eastlake for the light to change. The silver studs on Schaff’s leather jacket and the chunky zipper were rusted from the rain. Sometime long ago he or some other wasted amateur had pierced his ears badly in a few places; he wore a single simple gold loop, tangled with his hair, which was soft and dark and threaded with a bit of white-grey jarring on someone so young, and had left the rest of the holes to scar. His knuckles were tattooed spottily with the words WOLF and TRAP. He had missed a spot shaving just under his jaw. “How do you even know about Rose-Ken,” Graeme asked. 

Schaff’s cheek dimpled when he smiled, which also seemed out-of-character. “I can read,” he said. 

“I didn’t mean — it’s just pretty esoteric magical theory.” 

“Montclair’s mom had a book — one of those kind of Dark magical theory texts. I forget what it was called. When I was living with them I taught myself some magic out of it. Tell you the truth at first I was looking for theory of cursebreaking.” 

“It’s very inexact.” 

“Yeah, so I gave up. I never went to magic school and I didn’t even have a wand then. Basically everything I know I learned from Montclair and his mom.” 

“Was she a witch too?” 

“A squib… At the time when I lived with them she was the most in-demand meth cook in western Idaho.” 

“And she had a book with Rose-Ken in it.” 

“Yeah. I never asked why. I don’t think she knew I was reading them. I don’t really think she liked me.” 

“She still in Idaho?” 

“Pretty sure. I mean, we stole her car.” 

“Oh my god.” 

“She sure as hell wouldn’t want it back now…” 

They stopped at the corner of Denny and Melrose to catch their breath before surmounting the remaining hills. Having lived in Seattle since he was eleven and even before then in the mountains to the East Graeme was rarely tired out by the hills anymore. Something else alarming for the compendium — that he had even lost something about his basic physical ability to manage this reality. 

“Where do you want to have breakfast,” Schaff asked him. 

“I said I’m not hungry.” 

“Too bad. I am.” 

“I thought heroin curbed your appetite.” 

Schaff’s brow cocked halfway up his forehead, drawing the corner of his mouth up with it. “I still have to, like, eat,” he said, “and so do you, dumbass.” He set off again up the hill and Graeme followed. “We’re going to the diner. You can have one Bloody Mary if you eat something.” 

“I’m not hungry — ”

“You do realize the reason you’re about to pass out from walking up the hill is because there’s like no sugar at all in your blood.” 

“What’s your excuse then.” 

“I don’t remember… the doctor explained it to me. But I was, you know, high.” 

“Montclair told me about — ”

“It’s not _that_ ,” Schaff said. He spat out the word, and his face sharpened again. “I’m in, what is it, clinical latency for _that_. But _this_ — well I think I also got it from Royce.” 

Royce was the bass player in Killing Curse, and had also played in Terrormancy. He was Montclair’s most obsequious sycophant, though these were in far from short supply. He was about five-foot-six and had had his canine teeth sharpened by a Muggle dentist, likely in attempt to appear more threatening to almost no avail, and he was fond of doing toxic levels of cocaine and harassing women. “You and Royce — ” 

“Oh my god,” said Schaff, “by needles.” 

“Sorry, sorry — ”

“I mean, it’s whatever.” 

“How long have you known?” 

“About six months. But who knows when I got it ‘cause we’ve shared needles forever.” 

“Montclair said you were in an introspective mood.” 

“I might just say depressed…” 

They turned onto 10th Avenue, which was almost eerily quiet this early except for the echoing cries of crows in the park at the end of the street. At night this neighborhood was a hotbed of seedy Muggle pubs and fetish clubs, and underneath them all was the sprawling basement complex where most of the bands in the city rehearsed. The diner was located conveniently across from the basement and as such frequented by musicians at all hours of the day and night. But it was a Sunday morning and not quite seven, so the diner was deserted except for a crew of ER nurses celebrating the end of their shifts in the front booth with tequila shots and cheeseburgers. Kyla from Splanchomancy, who scrounged a living picking up shifts at just about any restaurant that would have her, was behind the counter, putting a fresh pot of coffee on to brew; she looked vaguely surprised to see Graeme and Schaff together, but she waved a manicured hand around the room gesturing for them to take any table. Like the Wild West villain he might’ve been in another life Schaff led Graeme to the darkest rear corner booth and took the seat that put his back to the wall. 

“What are you going to eat,” Schaff asked. 

“Toast and a Bloody Mary.” 

“What about protein.” 

“Toast and bacon and a Bloody Mary then.” 

“You should really get, like at least one egg — ”

“Shut up, Schaff, I’m not a child…” 

Schaff ignored this only because Kyla came over with the coffee pot and two chipped ceramic mugs. Once she’d filled them she rested a sympathetic hand on Graeme’s shoulder. Like Cal had, she moved her touch away when he didn’t respond to it. “How are you holding up.” 

“I’m not.” 

“It was a lovely ceremony.” 

“I guess.” In the silence that ensued Kyla looked desperately across the table toward Schaff for conversation help. Graeme, feeling guilty, mumbled, “Thanks for coming.” 

“Of course…” 

“So you work here now Ky,” Schaff said. He folded his fingers into a lattice behind his head and leaned back against the leather, elbows of the jacket creaking. Graeme wilted back in the booth in immense relief. 

“Yeah, you know, I work everywhere…” 

“Early shift must be interesting.” 

“Honestly it’s mostly wasted nurses.” 

“How’s that for a new band name.” 

“Oh, that’s actually a good one. Kind of a Sonic Youth vibe, if you two ever want to jam.” 

“Two guitarists and a bass player none of whom can sing would be a fucked up band,” Graeme pointed out, not intending to kill the vibe but killing the vibe. Schaff had put the sympathetic thing between his eyebrows again, and Kyla’s hand feinted once more toward Graeme’s shoulder before seemingly deciding otherwise. 

“Well do you guys maybe know what you want to eat…” 

“Toast and a Bloody Mary,” said Graeme. 

“Do you want jam — there’s really good blackberry jam — ”

“No thanks, that’s fine.” 

“What about you, Lockett.” 

“Um, three blueberry pancakes, and two orders of bacon and two fried eggs, and some hash browns, and can we get cream and sugar for the coffee?” 

“You hungry?” Kyla asked, writing everything down in a neat, cramped hand. 

Schaff smiled. So help him Graeme couldn’t help but feel perhaps this was the most fucked up thing about the whole ordeal. It was as though some entirely new conditions had been applied to the terms which governed Schaff’s behavior and personality. Unlike Montclair and Royce, Schaff hadn’t filed his canine teeth, but they were naturally sharp, and one snagged on his chapped lip. “Yeah,” he said, “starving.” 

“I’ll tell them to be quick in the kitchen,” Kyla said, tucking her notepad back in the pocket of her apron and picking up the coffee pot. Then she disappeared toward the back. 

“I would honestly kill to be in a band with Kyla,” Schaff said contemplatively as she slipped away. He had leaned forward conspiratorially toward Graeme and had found a spoon to stir his burnt-smelling coffee into a whirling hypnotic vortex, though there was nothing in it. “She rips on bass.” 

“Well maybe now you have,” Graeme reminded him. 

Schaff’s laugh, which Graeme had never heard before, was louder than might be expected looking at him. It wasn’t a pretty sound but it was nice to hear, if kind of shocking, like lots of glass breaking at once, or an old dog barking down the street. It was rather like he played guitar, which was aggressively but not unprettily. “Maybe I have,” he said. “Do you think she’d be in a band with me?” 

“It would have to be really good because she’s in three or four bands I think.” 

Graeme didn’t think Schaff’s guitar playing in Killing Curse was all that good. It was certainly substandard compared to what he was capable of as had been illustrated in Terrormancy. Wray had chalked the decline in quality up to Schaff’s clearly demonstrated preference for drugs. “I’ve been saving little bits of songs and things for a couple years,” Schaff told Graeme now. “I think it would be pretty good.” 

“You didn’t give them to Killing Curse?” 

“Fuck no.” 

“Why not?” 

“Montclair was royally not interested in it being anybody else’s band. I guess he learned his lesson with Terrormancy. I think I had more will to fight for my songs then. And I had Devon.” 

Devon Rice had been the very capable drummer in Terrormancy, and according to pervasive rumor he had also written most of the band’s lyrics, but he’d died in ’86. His had been the first among the wave of deaths that had touched them all and that had felt real. Graeme and Wray had gone to the ceremony at Golden Gardens in Ballard where Devon’s friends had scattered his ashes. The city had seemed quiet for a couple days and people spoke in whispers. _Taking stock of reality_ , as Schaff had said earlier. 

It had taken a longer time then to adjust to death. It was already happening quicker and quicker. Soon most people would just forget that they had ever known Wray. Maybe they had already started forgetting. 

“He went to bat for you,” Graeme said to Schaff. Not a question. 

“He was the first person who ever told me I was good at guitar. I could never really do it right for Montclair.” 

Kyla came back over then with the cream and sugar. “I really want to play in a band with you, Ky,” Schaff told her with the sincerity of a marriage proposal. 

She snorted laughter as though the prospect were ridiculous. “Is Bill going to — ”

“I’ll get him to loan me out.” 

“Okay. Let me think about it.” 

“Are you serious!” 

A few more ER nurses stumbled through the front door, evidently having already partaken in assorted vices en route, and Kyla backed away from the booth to seat them, laughing still. “I said I’ll think about it!” 

Schaff, grinning, showing teeth, practically destroyed his coffee with amounts of cream and sugar so excessive the sight of it turned Graeme’s stomach vicariously. “You don’t have to look at me like I’ve run over your dog,” he said. He was stirring again, this time with purpose. 

“I’m not.” 

“Let me take advantage of this,” Schaff went on. “We’re celebrating.” 

“Are we?” 

“Yes. You keep killing the mood.” 

Graeme rested his head on the table. The cold Formica somewhat soothed the dizzy ache behind his eyes. “I’m dying, Schaff.” 

“No you're not. Do you take cream and — ”

“Just sugar — just a little.” He closed his eyes. He heard the sugar, Schaff’s spoon against the ceramic, a kind of jazzy un-rhythm, and from the front window the pained echo of the nurses’ drunk laughter. Sound which lent form to space. “What did you do when Devon died.” 

“OD’d for the first time.” Graeme looked up at him blearily. “I wasn't going to recommend it,” he said. 

“Did you do it on purpose.” 

“Yeah. That’s why I didn’t go to that thing in Golden Gardens, actually. Was in Saint Rod’s.” 

“No ice cubes that time.” 

“No… only Montclair is that much of a fucking sadist.” Graeme closed his eyes again. He heard Schaff’s jacket creak as he leaned back in the booth, and then Schaff’s boot pressed against his under the table, the way Alex’s had at the funeral the afternoon previous. “You’ll feel better when you eat,” Schaff said. 

He was thinking about how Montclair hadn’t resuscitated Schaff from overdosing out of any kind of feeling of obligation for the life of his friend. It had terrified him to imagine that if Schaff was gone he might be alone. Such a sentiment was disturbingly relatable. It was almost humanizing. 

“In the ambulance, they have this stuff,” Schaff continued. “A Muggle drug. You need to use it pretty quickly. I guess that time I didn’t technically stop breathing. I wasn’t technically dead, you know, like the other times. I mean, it was the first time. It took a lot less to kill me then than it would now.” 

“How much would it take to kill you now?” 

“More than what I gave Montclair. Did you know Gram Parsons OD’d on enough liquid morphine to kill three people?” 

“Who?” 

“Oh my god, Sugarbush… I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” 

“And what’s death like?” 

“I don’t really know. I didn’t get very far. Reminded me of home, so maybe it would look different for you.” 

“Home?” 

“Yeah, it looked like the Salmon River canyon.” 

It was probably hell if it looked like Idaho, Graeme thought, didn’t say. 

“It was horrible when Dev died,” Schaff said, abhorrently putting still more cream in his coffee. “It was an endless nightmare, also because they don’t give you anything in the hospital, and they kept me there for like three days. I thought I was gonna die too, but actually dying feels nothing like this.” 

Graeme didn’t argue this potently ridiculous point. He sat up and wrapped his hands around the warm coffee mug. “Dev saved me once at this Sectumsempra gig… there was a huge pit and someone threw me into his kit.” 

“Probably he was thinking about his kit,” said Schaff, cocking an eyebrow. 

“Maybe. He was the sickest drummer.” 

“Yeah. He was a poet too. He felt more things than normal people. But we don't have to talk about death if you don’t want.” 

“What the fuck else are we going to talk about.” 

“I don’t know. What else do we have in common. Guitar?” 

“We just stole everything from you,” Graeme told him. It didn’t really matter anymore anyway. 

“Yeah, I mean I know, it’s whatever. Not _all_ of it. And besides what you did steal, you made it better.” 

“Do you really think so?” 

“Yeah, of course.” 

The thought of playing guitar again was like the thought of doing magic again, which was to say almost unimaginably terrifying. He understood that it would hurt when he tried it. How badly remained to be seen and as such he assumed the worst. When he picked up the instrument again just the weight of it would crush him and the strings would snap and rip his fingers and then the sound would cut him open from the stomach flaying outward. “So there’s really not that much else to talk about then is there,” he told Schaff. 

Schaff cocked his brow still higher. He looked about to level some kind of devastating remark, so it was lucky that Kyla showed up to stop it in its tracks with a monumental amount of breakfast food and a massive Bloody Mary in a pint glass. That thing, which was with Graeme sometimes but not all the time, usually sleeping, the kind of thing you tiptoed around to keep from waking up, threw its entire mostly-teeth body against the wall of his ribs. It did it again when Schaff, with a nimbleness he shockingly possessed, grabbed the glass from Kyla’s hand and brought it to his side of the table. He slid it across the Formica toward the far corner out of Graeme’s reach, leaving a trail of hot sauce and tomato juice like the watery clear-ish blood at the end of a deadly hemorrhage. Graeme, trying his best to soothe the fucking thing, which was hard because it was mostly teeth, was throttling the coffee mug with white knuckles. Schaff was watching him as though daring him to find issue with this confiscation. Kyla, unloading the tray with a gestural arc of mismatched greasy plates in front of Schaff, was watching the space between the two of them like it was a soap opera. She seemed loathe to slip away and even when she did Graeme could feel her casually watching from behind the bar. 

“Eat,” Schaff told him. He cut an egg yolk open and sopped up the vivid yellow spill with a forkful of hash browns. 

“Schaff — ” 

“You can have it when you eat.” 

_I need it so I can eat_ sounded desperate and was anyway a lie. _I need it so I can stand this reality_ was even more desperate, if marginally more true. Maybe the best way out of this was through. He watched the heat of the toast, charred at the curled-up rough edges, melt the slab of butter. Something else twisted in his stomach now. When he looked up toward the bar Kyla was watching him but she quickly looked away. “Ky,” he said. 

“Yeah?” 

“I will have — actually if there’s blackberry jam.” 

She brought it over. When he ate all the toast Schaff begrudgingly pushed the Bloody Mary back across the table with two fingers. Kyla, bless her, mixed strong drinks. “Are you going to eat all that bacon,” Graeme asked Schaff. 

The weird grin was changing the shape of Schaff’s severe face again. “No,” he said. 

He ate the bacon and a fried egg and some hash browns and a wedge of pancake and polished off the Bloody Mary and ate the olives and the cornichon and the block of cheese Kyla had speared onto a toothpick as garnish. “You should have come with us,” he told Schaff, finishing his coffee. “We used to come here after every full moon and order everything on the breakfast menu.” 

“I don’t think Wray would’ve liked that.” Graeme was going to give him a white lie to the contrary but Schaff beat him to it. “Actually I don’t think Bill would have liked it either. Besides no breakfast food in the world will help you through like twelve hours of withdrawal featuring two excruciatingly painful full-body transformations.” 

Graeme and Wray had customarily sat on the other side of the diner, where it was darker, and sometimes he brought aspirin with him for Wray or else they would smoke a joint on the walk, and sometimes, when it had been particularly bad for whatever undisclosed and evidently undisclosable reason, Wray couldn’t or wouldn’t eat much, which also was not discussed, and Graeme would bring the leftovers back to Alex’s and leave them in the fridge for Wray to have for dinner. 

“I guess not,” he said to Schaff. 

“He was in a lot of pain,” Schaff told him. His voice was gentle but he wouldn’t quite look at Graeme. “Did you know that.” 

“Well yeah, I mean, the knees — ”

“It got into his wrists, elbows, you know,” Schaff went on, face twisting a little, as though he were wading deeper and deeper into very cold water, “it hurt him to play guitar.” 

Something invisible kicked Graeme in the chest. Sensing a pattern, the little thing made of teeth started determinedly gnawing from the inside. 

Schaff was stacking the myriad of mismatched plates Kyla’d brought him in a clearly intentional yet inscrutable order. “They had like a Muggle x-ray sort of thing at the Registry and I was with him when he did it,” he continued. “You could see like, how swollen, in his hands, all the — whatever, ligaments…” 

Sinking made itself known now alongside everything else. How deep could one’s sinking feeling go, he wondered, not for the first time in the past week. “I didn’t know — ”

“He didn’t want you to know.” 

“I would’ve — ”

“What would you have done, Graeme.” 

He tried to speak before he realized there was nothing to say. He covered his mouth with his hand. 

“The only other thing you could’ve done was buy the drugs for him,” Schaff said. Graeme flinched. “That’s it. There’s nothing else.” 

“Why are you telling me this.” 

“I thought you wanted answers.” 

_Not these_ , Graeme thought, didn’t say. 

“There’s no living like this,” Schaff said. “Ask any werewolf in America — ask any one in the world. It’s okay to hate Montclair. I mean, we’re all in this mess because he couldn’t stand to suffer by himself. But there’s always — there was always going to be a bigger answer. And it doesn’t mean you failed.” 

“It doesn’t?” 

“You can’t win. If you fail to solve an impossible problem it’s not failure. It’s just — we’re all beholden to the laws of physics, you know…” 

“Lockett.” 

“Yeah?” 

He was thinking he had to say something. There was a knot of words stuck in his chest and hurting. But nothing would come out. 

“He was trying to protect you too,” Schaff continued. He was trying to be reassuring to precisely the opposite effect. “Everybody else understood there’s no solution besides death. And he didn’t want you to know — ” 

The knot of something stuck in his chest was not words. He stood, jostling Schaff’s stack of plates and spilling the icy dregs of the Bloody Mary over the crumpled paper placemats. The diner had filled up in the interim with families visiting before church and awkward uncouples breakfasting after one-night stands. The wasted nurses were now utterly plastered. Through their laughter, which sounded like a chorus of buzzsaws and deathbirds, Graeme couldn’t hear whatever Schaff was saying to him, which evidently was something important judging by the expression on Schaff’s face. Regardless it was less important than the pressing reality. Graeme ran out the front door jostling the hanging bells and around the corner into the alley and threw up. 

They used to wait out here, smoking joints, for Alex and Mercedes and Marsden to arrive, just talking about new records, old bands, friends, not-friends, Wray’s knees, astrology, distortion spells… “The full moon’s in Libra,” Wray said, accepting the joint when Graeme passed it; Graeme didn’t know what that meant, but he knew what Wray’s face — that particular cocked eyebrow — meant. “Technically,” Wray went on, “it means balance, but you know…” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Well it’s, there are also all these other transits and passages and things. Crazy energies.” 

He said all this with such a completely straight face that Graeme laughed. Then he couldn’t stop laughing so he leaned against the wall in attempt to recover. “What!” Wray half-shouted in mock indignation. “You’re such a Capricorn!” 

The brick smelled wet and was friezed with a thin, slippery rime of lichen. In the wedge between foundation and asphalt a few cigarette butts were growing moss. Graeme coughed acid. There were hurried heavy footsteps from the sidewalk and then Schaff was close by murmuring a litany, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Graeme pressed the crown of his head against the cold, damp brick. Schaff was preemptively gathering up his hair which turned out to be the right move because another wave of nausea set upon him like a cloud of bats or something grasping the edges of most of his internal organs with claws and turning them upside down to empty them out through his mouth. When this was done they shook him like wet laundry until they came around again. They were gentler this time now that there was nothing left in his stomach. Not even acid. Eyes squeezed shut, he spat something bile-tasting against the wall. Schaff let go of his hair, which anyway stayed back because he hadn’t washed it in so long, and moved his cold hand in an awkward shrinking circle high on Graeme’s back which he probably meant to be comforting. “Are you done,” he said gently. 

“Think so,” Graeme rasped through the acid throat. He knocked his forehead against the wall as though to bodily clear some space amid the fog for sense. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t’ve eaten so much in one sitting,” Schaff said contemplatively, as though he had not been bribing Graeme to the contrary not twenty minutes previous. 

“You think?” 

“Have you been sleeping?” 

“ _No,_ Lockett, what are you, the grief police?” 

“I’m just saying…” 

Graeme stood up and leaned against the wall. In a gesture which seemed shockingly intimate Schaff Vanished his puke from the brick and the asphalt with a spell under his breath. “I’m not taking any advice from you,” Graeme told him. 

“You don’t have to. I’m just saying. But maybe you should go home and — ”

“Let’s go to Volunteer Park.” 

Schaff folded his arms over his chest and pursed his mouth like a diligent schoolmarm. But then he said, “We have to settle the bill.” 

“I have, like, three dollars.” 

“Fine. Give it to me.” 

These were the three dollars left by Wray in the pocket of the suit coat. While Schaff went back inside Graeme sat on the wet concrete and perused the rest of the objects that had been left there: used tissues (two of them full of blackened blood), loose rolling papers, a chewed-up guitar pick, a few doubloons and change, tobacco flakes and one or two marijuana flowers, movie ticket stubs, a receipt from the grocery store on Fifteenth Ave, where Wray had apparently purchased cough drops and Icy Hot and a pint of strawberries ten days before his suicide, another receipt from the record store where he had bought a B-52s album a few months previous (Graeme had been with him then), foil candy wrappers worried into tiny stones… 

Probably the dollar bills he had given Schaff were change from the Icy Hot and the strawberries, Graeme thought. According to the receipt Wray had paid with a ten dollar bill. It was likely the strawberries were still in the fridge and had rotted by now unless Alex or Mercedes had thrown them away. Wray was always prone to purchases of fanciful food which usually went to waste because he was also prone to eating scrambled eggs and ramen noodles for every meal. 

Graeme held the guitar pick in the palm of his hand. It was one of the funny burgundy-red marbled ones you could get at the music store on Pike for ten cents at the checkout counter and/or easily shoplift; Graeme and Wray usually used them, and Alex did too when she played guitar. The point was shredded from Wray’s guitar strings, but also the prints of Wray’s teeth were pressed into the plastic toward the rounded end; on some of the songs he would hold it in his mouth so he could play with his fingers. 

“Ready?” said Schaff, who had returned without his noticing. He offered a clammy hand and helped Graeme to his feet. The world spun and slid and blackened and then it developed again. They set off together up Pine toward Fifteenth Avenue. The rise steepened and sharpened between Twelfth and Fifteenth, and then a few more blocks to the East it formed the long spine of Capitol Hill. Down the other end the city fell into Lake Washington and beyond it Bellevue and beyond it the foothills of the Cascades. The morning fog had blown off and with it, momentarily, the rain. Above them the light clouds moved at speed drawing together and apart with a painterly shadow and energy. 

Up on Fifteenth Ave the shops had started opening and people were walking on the street in the wary eye-contactless manner of mornings in Seattle. In the front yard of one lovely old craftsman house a family setting up Halloween decorations stopped their work to watch Graeme and Schaff go by as though their work had inadvertently summoned forth demons. Only one of us has literally committed murder today, Graeme thought about telling them. “How do you feel,” he asked Schaff. 

“Me? Fine.” 

“Just fine?” 

He looked up toward the white eye of the sun obscured by clouds as though he could measure the time of day by its position. “Probably I have two more hours,” he said, like Cinderella at the ball. It took Graeme a moment to realize that he was talking about distance from withdrawal. 

“I meant — about, you know.” 

“What’s there to feel about that?” 

“I don’t know, relief, regret, whatever…” 

They waited at the corner of Fifteenth and Aloha for the cars to pass. There was worshipful organ music rising already from the church on the corner and it seemed to lend another color or texture to the still and humid air. “I never thought about what — well I didn’t exactly plan for after,” said Schaff. 

Neither did I, Graeme thought, didn’t say. 

“It doesn’t feel different,” Schaff went on, “but that’s to be expected.” 

“You don’t feel — like, changed, or free or something — ”

“It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t stop what some evil person did in life, after they die; it doesn’t erase anything.” 

“Well I know that — ”

“You don’t feel free of him, do you?” 

“No. But I’m not — ”

“I know he cut you,” Schaff said; “He talked about it fucking nonstop.” 

A sharp chill crept up Graeme’s spine like the touch of ragged fingernails. “It’s not the same,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s not a transference wound.” 

“Maybe not by the literal scientific definition. He did transfer something to you. Or he transferred something to Wray and Wray transferred it to you. And he gave Wray something even before he bit him. Some curse — because it was a curse. I don’t know how he did it. Imagine if any of us had listened to our gut and clocked him as an evil fuck from the beginning. But none of us did. Or if we did it didn’t really matter enough to us to stay away from him.” 

They walked into the park and along the tree-lined promenade toward the Asian Art Museum. There were a few families walking on the paths, keeping from the shaded nooks under the trees where sometimes you could find used needles in the wood chip and leaf loam. On the West lawn a handful of fratty types had taken advantage of the lull in the autumn rain to throw a frisbee around with hungover lassitude. Like the poetically doomed character in some cautionary tale for children Graeme followed Schaff into the woods behind the bandshell and down the lawn toward the tennis courts where it was a little more secluded but for the distant rhythmic thwacking of volleys through the trees, intercut with laughter, a dog barking… They sat together in the grass beside one of the huge rhododendrons. The pink flowers from earlier in the summer were rotting into the wood chip and loam. “Do you still feel sick,” Schaff said. 

It had nothing to do with the earlier nausea. Now it was the possessing thought of Montclair’s apparent obsession with what had happened that night in June. “Kind of,” Graeme said. 

“I have a joint if you think it’ll help.” 

“I don’t know. But let’s have it.” 

It was about the thickness of Schaff’s index finger and he lit it with a match, cupping his hand around the business end. The sharp ends of the scar up his forearm were just visible inside the loose sleeve of his jacket. “What happened to your arm,” Graeme asked him, now that all pretense had mostly been abandoned. 

“Actually he did that as a human with one of those - _sempra_ curses, _sectumsempra, rictumsempra_ , I forget which. We were like… I want to say thirteen.” 

“Can’t you heal those wounds with magic?” 

“I’ve tried. I also don’t know how he did that. You know, he was terrible at magic really; it was all impulsive pretty much. But I think that makes it — ”

“Not necessarily beholden to the laws regulating the Latinate,” Graeme explained. “I wrote a paper about it.” 

Schaff passed him the joint. “It’s good, I guess, that there’s magical theory reasoning, you know; I think for a while I thought he was the devil, or it was all the fucking speed we were doing.” 

“What about the — when he bit you.” 

“Oh,” Schaff said. He straightened his legs out in the grass and lifted his t-shirt up toward his breastbone. His stomach was almost concave and the bones of his hips and ribs sharply defined, like the suffering pieta of an ascetic saint in a medieval altarpiece or a starved monk in the wall carvings of a Buddhist temple. These referents of piety were sullied somewhat by the scars, which were so horrible as to almost defy mental digestion. Unlike the spiraling garbage disposal-looking wound on his arm this had no such pattern or definition. It was just an indiscriminate mess. “Like ninety percent of the time werewolves kill their first victims,” Schaff explained cooly, tucking his shirt back in. “It’s like a miracle that I’m alive or whatever.” 

“Wray’s was very neat,” Graeme said, coughing smoke. 

“Yeah it was. He was very practiced by then. But let me see yours.” 

Graeme undid the buttons of the suit coat and untucked his flannel and t-shirt from the overlarge pants. There was an obviously sex-related bruise inside his hip — fucking Cal — and he found he couldn’t be bothered if Schaff noticed. As for the scars they were still ridged and purple-red and traced the upward movement of his lower ribs. Schaff touched the lowest one with his pinky finger gingerly as though they might still be painful. “Probably should have gotten stitches,” Graeme said. “They bled a lot. Probably also because I was fucking wasted and alcohol thins your blood.” 

“You’re always fucking wasted.” 

“So are you,” Graeme snapped, pulling his shirt down over his belly. 

“Fine,” said Schaff, but he was smiling a little, canine tooth set against his lower lip. “Touché.” He passed the joint back to Graeme. It was pretty worthless pot by the standards Graeme was accustomed to but he took another hit anyway, feeling the smoke burn something out inside his chest, as though whatever wound there was cauterizable by anything but time, by anything at all… When he passed it back Schaff held up his hands in seeming surrender. “I’m done if you are,” he said. 

“I’m done too.” 

Schaff stubbed the joint out in the grass and tucked it into a pocket he’d stitched into the lining of his leather jacket, alongside a few tightly folded sheets of lined paper and at least one of the packaged insulin needles they gave out at assorted harm reduction clinics scattered around the city. “Bill really wanted you, you know,” he went on, all too casually. “He was so fucking jealous.” 

“What the fuck would he be jealous about.” 

“That you had a friendship that was real, obviously. And because he couldn’t have it he wanted to ruin it however he could. Especially after — ” He indicated Graeme’s scar with the same pinky finger. 

Graeme flinched. “I thought he probably — that he might not take that too well.” 

“He couldn’t believe Wray would do that for you. That anyone would do that for anyone. It scared him.” 

“It _scared_ — ”

“Trust me,” said Schaff, “I know what he acts like scared.” 

“Like how?” 

“How does any hyper-masculine macho asshole act when scared? Like a fucking cornered animal. You should’ve heard the things he said, in the cells. Or maybe you shouldn’t have. The chaperones are technically supposed to stop things like that, but, you know.” 

“Things like what?” 

“Well, Graeme, I mean…” 

“You can just tell me.” 

“All the terrible horrible unspeakable things he was going to do to you. And the girls and Marsden too, but mostly you.” 

This at least was unsurprising. It was the source or wellspring of the powerful guilt which had rushed through his blood and lymph into his every bone and bit of grist over the past week and seeped so deeply it might never come out again. “I thought that was maybe why,” he told Schaff. 

“Why what?” 

“Why Wray fucking killed himself, obviously.” 

“There’s no one reason for these things. Don’t you think he might’ve stuck it out to protect you, if it was only that?” 

It was almost unbearable to consider this dimension, not that he hadn’t, having spent the days before the funeral unsleeping in Wray’s bed watching the light move and pressing the sharp edge of his consciousness into the wound. The necessary discontent of this understanding was that perhaps he had brought it all upon himself by being too pathetic and irresponsible to accept or even warrant protection. 

“He worried about you constantly,” Schaff continued. Perhaps heroin had fucked his brain such that he no longer understood how conversation of this ilk might not be exactly comforting. “He couldn’t let Montclair see. He told me he bought a bezoar at one of those potions ingredients fairs in case something happened to you. And he asked me, you know, right after I got the diagnosis, how I knew something was wrong.” 

“How _did_ you know?” 

“I thought I had mono again except my hands wouldn’t stop twitching. But that’s not the point. It was too much. That, you know, Montclair, the curse, the endless fucking monologue, that was another straw but it wasn’t the only thing. So it’s entirely useless to keep beating yourself up about it.” 

It was a nice platitude — which he had heard before, from some of the mourners in the receiving line, whose faces were fleshy smears, their voices like a 45 played at 33rpm, time not-really-moving, every atom in his body magnetically straining toward the front of the room and the closed casket in a velvet berth of white calla lilies — but a moot point. “Don’t you ever look for all the places,” Graeme asked Schaff, “all the ways it was your fault?” 

“That what was my fault?” 

“I don’t know, all of it…” 

“I guess.” He was quiet for a moment and Graeme didn’t think he would go on, but eventually he did. “I think I remember the time when Royce — or at least when he knew he was, you know.” 

“And?” 

“And I had a kind of bad feeling, the same way I did when Bill said, I found a dead deer, come and see it, when we were kids… but I guess that bad feeling wasn’t as bad as the other bad feeling.” 

“Would you ever — do you think you would, um, give Royce — ” 

Schaff’s expression sharpened and tightened. “I don’t care about Royce,” he said, as though he were trying to convince himself this was true. “Fuck Royce. I wouldn’t’ve ever met him even if it hadn’t been for Bill. Every bad thing that’s ever happened to me is because Bill couldn’t stand to be alone. So he had to ruin my life too so that I would be with him. I don’t care that I’m going to die. I don’t even care about pain — I mean, I have heroin. I’m not scared of dying, I’ve been there. It’s not scary. It’s just gates and water, water flowing through the gates.” 

“You could live for a long time being HIV positive, though, there’s medication and everything now, right?” 

“Anti-retrovirals and stuff, yeah. I have all these prescriptions and everything but I can hardly afford them and even when I can I hardly remember to take them…” 

“I can help — ”

“Graeme.” 

“What?” 

“You don’t want to do that.” 

“Why not?” 

“You just — you can’t replace — ”

“ — I’m not trying to _replace_ , it couldn’t, it wouldn’t _replace_ — ”

“You took care of him. Not yourself. Now you need to take care of yourself, obviously. That’s what he would want you to do.” 

Even sitting up suddenly was too much physical and emotional effort and as such Graeme lay on his back in the wet grass and looked up at the clouds moving until the brightness behind them made him squint. The cold dew and rain seeped up through the fabric of the suit coat like waking up in a clammy bed after having sweat through some running nightmare. Schaff leaned just so against Graeme’s folded-up knees and at first he thought it was by accident. 

“Part of me is like, just gone,” Graeme told him, not sure why, not really feeling the words leave his body, just hearing them after they had already come out, “it just got up and walked away. I don’t know, I need something, something to put there.” 

“If you quit drinking — what if you put that there. Just something to do.” 

Putting quitting drinking there seemed a lot harder than just putting drinking there. “What if you quit heroin,” Graeme told Schaff, knowing it was a foregone conclusion. 

“We could try together but I don’t know if I can.” 

“Well I don’t know if I can either.” 

Graeme pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Here we are then, eh?” 

“What?” 

“There’s nothing else — what else is there to say?” 

When he moved his hands away the field of his vision was flattened and sparking from the pressure. Schaff was hovering over him like a hospice nurse checking if he’d survived the night with a shocking expression of absolute heartbreak etched in sharp lines across the severe features. “Don’t look at me like that, Lockett,” Graeme said, covering his eyes again. Something which weighed a thousand pounds had started creeping up from his chest into his throat and it wouldn’t do for it to creep any further in public. 

“Like what!” 

Like I don’t deserve this, he thought before he could stop himself. 

The clouds moved and tightened and started spitting again, at first like standing on a bluff above the sea. When they could feel the rain through the treecover they left the park together and walked out to Thirteenth Ave and South toward home. For a long time they were silent. Sometimes Graeme thought he heard the wind speaking and stopped in his tracks and then they moved on again. In the corner of his eye he watched Schaff’s brow tighten by increments in something like consternation or pain and at first couldn’t comprehend through the fog that the tide was going out, or the flame was guttering, or whatever symbolic referent could best encapsulate the end of the high and the beginning of the low. “Are you going back to the Den,” Graeme asked finally, at the corner of Thomas. He knew Schaff would have to turn West at the next block to walk down the hill and cross over the interstate. 

Schaff’s voice was tight too, like the strap of a straitjacket pulled taut. “I can’t decide,” he said. 

“Royce’ll have found him by now, probably.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Maybe the police and the coroner — ”

“Graeme, I know.” 

“You shouldn’t go back,” he said, feeling like he was speaking to air. For a moment it seemed that Schaff agreed. At John Street he seemed to hesitate but then came jogging after Graeme across the busy street with the loose soles of his shoes clapping the pavement.

“Do you want to come over or something?” Graeme asked. 

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” 

“Why not?” 

The sharp canine tooth sunk again into the worried blood spot in Schaff’s lower lip, this time in effort to hold something back. “Because you should sleep,” he tried measuredly. 

This reminded Graeme that perhaps the reason he felt like there was only a single thread left holding the straining wobbling conglomerate of his disparate pieces together was that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. They stopped at the corner of 13th and Olive. Halfway down the block toward Pine Street the thick beech and pine trees that hid Alex and Mercedes and Wray’s house shifted into each other whispering in the high breeze and the rain. Before Schaff could turn down the hill to head home through Cal Anderson Park Graeme stepped nimbly in front of him, nearly tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. “What are you going to do when you go back home?” 

“What do you think,” Schaff asked. He wouldn’t quite meet Graeme’s eyes. He was watching over his shoulder down the hill at the traffic on Twelfth Avenue; there was a globe of mist caught in his eyelash, magnifying the fine dark hairs. “Are you going to tell me you’re not going to have a drink when you get home?” 

“I’m not,” Graeme lied. 

“Sure.” 

“Lockett.” 

Vision matched and clicked. Schaff’s eyes were very dark, a little creased and bloodshot, ringed purple. The color in his face kind of like a kindergartener’s destroyed watercolor box. Deep in the black pool a few sharks were circling. It was so like and unlike it had been with Wray that Graeme felt something resting against his solar plexus and something else against the join of his shoulderblades had begun to coordinately press toward one another as if magnetized. “What,” Schaff said. 

Graeme said it quickly enough that he might later claim to have never said it at all: “If you stop I’ll stop with you.” 

“Okay.” 

“Really?” 

“What?” 

“Just _okay_?” 

“You can’t do this,” said Schaff, almost a hiss now, “it’s not good for you. This is just bargaining.” 

“It’s not just — I mean it.” 

“You’re not in your right mind, Graeme.” 

“But — ”

“Why don't we talk about it later.” 

Where does this feeling come from? Powerful defeat. Like these two pressing planes met each other in the middle having ground him, bones, everything, down to a paper-thin sheet. Like this last remaining thread had frayed to a single tensile strand stretching under a weight becoming ever more unmanageable. And yet there was nothing more to try except: “Sure,” he said. “Later.” 

Again Schaff moved more quickly than Graeme had really known he could. His hand wrapped the inside of Graeme’s shoulder where the suit’s silken lapels were widest, and then he leaned forward and pressed his dry rough lips to Graeme’s cheekbone. The touch was almost accidental. Graeme had hardly registered it by the time Schaff pulled away again, and when at last it reached him he missed it before it had even fully passed through. “Take care of yourself,” Schaff told him. The twist of pain in his voice gave this the force of law. Then he slipped past Graeme and down the hill. 

Graeme stood on the corner for a long time, watching Schaff’s hunched figure in the leather jacket until he crossed Twelfth Avenue and disappeared into the park. A few minutes standing still was enough for everything to catch up with him again and he was obliged to drag himself and every vengeful animal who had chewed like a termite into his body where it was weakest down the rest of the block to the house, where Alex was sitting on the porch in her red robe with a cigarette and a cup of tea. Just the sight of her — the flare of bright silk, her tangled bed-hair, her fixed and calibrated staring into space, through the fence and through the apartment building across the street and through the man-altered arrangement of the city into some other past- or future-world — was like a verdant watering hole in an inhospitable desert. “There you are,” she said, noticing him at the gate. 

“Here I am.” In fact he wasn’t sure. Alex stood up, brushing ash from her lap, and reached a hand out for him. She had chewed her nails bloody, which she usually only did in Septembers or if she had no cigarettes. “Alex,” he said, with almost the very last there was before the thread snapped. 

“Yeah?” 

“Sorry.” 

“Graeme — ”

“I’m — yeah. Just really sorry.” 

She embraced him. Her hair was cold. After a moment he pressed his face into her neck. She smelled like sleep and cigarettes and old beer and the camomile and camphor of her tea. “Will you play guitar with me tonight,” she asked. Her voice was muffled a little against the padded lapels. 

“Yeah,” Graeme said, almost without thinking. 

“Are you sure?” 

“No.” 

She laughed. He could feel her laugh, the start of her laugh in the bones of her back. “Neither am I,” she said. 

They went inside together. There was no one else in the house — Mercedes had gone, as she did most Sundays, to church in Magnolia with her parents — and Alex had morning cartoons on the TV, volume muted, colors flickering across the footprinted hardwoods. Flowers from the funeral, a seeming blur of green and sensitive pale colors, decorated every visible surface, so as to give the place the appearance and smell of a greenhouse. Alex’s hand rested high on Graeme’s back. “Let me make you a cup of tea,” she said. 

“I’m just — thanks.” He was reduced to basic declarative phrases. “Need to sleep. Maybe after.” 

“Okay. Do you want my room or — ”

“No thanks, Alex, it’s really alright.” 

In Wray’s dark room behind the closed door the bed was still unmade. There were flowers in here as well, arranged haphazardly on the floor and the bedside table and on Wray’s dresser beside the collapsing stack of his cassettes and a slipping pile of National Geographics so old you could feel the soapy ink and dust on your fingers after touching them. Graeme sat on the end of the bed and took his boots off. He had forgotten about having splinched his toenail and the blood-drenched sock at first startled him again. As he hung up the suit in the closet he heard Alex rustling around with the pots and pans in the kitchen. If he closed his eyes he could imagine that perhaps this was happening a long time ago and they were all in the living room laughing at the severity of his hangover… 

You can break now, he thought at the last thread. This is it. We’re alone now. 

He lay down in the bed and itched it, like cutting a box open with a key. He itched it and itched it until at last it broke in some great implosion of muddy and indistinct feeling, which washed over him once and then again, but by that time he was asleep, and they were only dreams: 

They were walking on the beach in the thick fog, which was so thick that there was no beach. Only the surf rolling up as one kind of colorless plane thick with spume and cold against the other. At Graeme’s feet the sand shifted and bubbled showing where a clam had burrowed underneath. 

“What’s there,” said Wray. His voice sounded underwater. 

They crouched together and the water eddied around their bare feet sucking the sand out from underneath them and sinking. “Geoduck or something,” Graeme said, calculating by the arrangement of the dimples in the sand. 

The billowy sleeves of Wray’s white button-up stuck to him sheer with sea spray showing his summer freckles. The sand and salt in the fine hairs on his forearms. “Want to dig it up,” he asked. 

“Well if I do, you have to eat it.” 

“I’ll eat it.” 

“Are you serious?” 

“Of course I’m serious.” 

“What ever happened to trying to be vegan?” 

“It barely has consciousness!” 

When Wray stood his knees didn’t crack, which was how Graeme knew for certain that it wasn’t real. The cold water had stuck Wray’s trousers to his skinny knees cleaving along the lines of the bone like a cast in a museum. He watched down at Graeme feeling for the geoduck’s bubbles in the sand. Eventually he rested his hand against the back of Graeme’s head. “What’re you doing,” Graeme asked him. 

“Just watching.” 

The trick was to be very careful and slow so as not to break the shell. And anyway it was next to impossible with bare hands but he tried anyway, angling his fingers in straight and wedging the sand away as his dad would do with the clam shovel out by Cape Alava when they would camp there sometimes in the summers. They would boil them in a mix of beer and seawater over a guttering campfire… 

The tide was coming in too quickly and filled the hole before he could dig deep enough to scoop the clam out. “I don’t know if it’ll work, Wray,” Graeme said, still trying. 

“It’s alright.” 

“I knew you weren’t going to eat it.” 

Wray laughed. His hand on Graeme’s head shifted. The short fingernails skritched over his scalp toward the crown, tangling in the salt in his hair. “You can’t go much further with me,” Wray said. 

“What?” 

“It’s not up to me — it’s the rules of — ”

Things shifted and moved as though time and space operated as two tectonic plates slipping against one another. In Wray’s room in the house on Thirteenth Avenue Graeme lay in the bed facing the indistinct grey light catching dust in the window. Wray himself was sitting in the loose comma of his body the way he had countless times before when he would come in and check if Graeme was over his hangover enough to go get pancakes. His hand was in Graeme's hair still skritching except now he looked like a kind of light-negative of himself projected off a strip of film playing in some other place. Or else like he was the sharpest edges left of his being — sharp enough still to cut through the membrane into this world. 

“It’s the rules of what,” Graeme whispered. 

It didn't sound like him, or it sounded like him when he was younger, or it sounded like he might have if he’d gotten older… “They won’t let me say it.” 

“Who?” 

Wray’s mouth moved but only static came out. “They won’t let me say that either.” 

The wind blew the water up the beach. He could taste it. Wray’s fingers were very cold moving his hair from his face. “Why are you still here,” Graeme asked him. 

Wray’s brow tightened and he turned away. The colorless light in the window blurred his face out into a kind of mask of nothing. 

“You have to keep going all the way to the end,” Graeme said. He could hardly speak louder than a whisper because there was this thing in his throat which tasted like a rope made of salt wrapped around his larynx and pulled tightly from both ends. “According to the Rose-Kenworthy theory… didn’t you ever read that?” 

“Oh my god, of course not.” 

“Well you have to keep going all the way to the end,” Graeme told him. “You can’t stop.” 

“Why not?” 

“It isn’t the point of death, to stop. Otherwise, you know, why die.” 

The last word was more of a sob. He covered his mouth with his hand. Wray’s touch against his face was cold but present, real, full, _there_ … but he could look through the eyes, through the hollow skull, into the cobwebby corner of the ceiling beyond the apparition. 

“You need to go,” Graeme whispered.

“Do you really want me to?” 

“No.” Not so much a word, again, just a sound, a terrible kind of flaying broken sound. Perhaps he might’ve been embarrassed had this not been almost-a-dream. “It doesn't matter what I want.” 

There was a sudden and seemingly sourceless wash like static on a bad VHS. It skipped — Wray skipped, filtering through shades of color and being. Graeme sat up in a panic so quickly it felt like something in the back of his brain shoved quickly toward the front jostling a tidal wave of black liquid into his vision. But it didn’t take long for Wray to fade back in again, midsentence, as though nothing had happened: 

“ — no good way to say goodbye to you really. So, you know, sorry it has to be like this.”

“What?” 

“I’m just sorry — ”

“Don’t be sorry.” Graeme took a deep, steadying breath. Inside his head he felt a kind of ream of parchment inscribed front and back with minuscule tight black text delineating anything he might’ve said, could’ve said, had been imagining for days, had been whispering to himself in bed for days, had been broadcasting into the ether in the scant dark dreams, was unrolling just behind his eyes, barely visible in the smudged periphery. From this parchment he chose the following as the rough summation of it all: “I couldn’t bear it if you were sorry.” 

He looked through the eyes, which looked through him. Tape loop drone. He recalled, almost inanely, as a kind of seed dropped into his mind from somewhere else, his certainty when they played together that there was some shared identity between them which had been sewn into the fabric of fate at the beginning of time. And because of this there was no need to hear the answer, or at least not in words. It was passed over the bridge like a Cold War spy exchange and he understood. 

This solved something. The static wash flared again; Graeme blinked, or maybe he opened his eyes, into another kind of salt, and another sound, which was someone knocking on the door, saying his name. It was Alex, who just opened the door when he didn’t respond. She was wearing a black t-shirt handprinted with flour, which was also in her hair, and she looked relieved to see him sitting up, disheveled, alive. “Did you say something?” she asked. 

The light moved at the end of the bed, drawing his vision. But it was only the bamboo tree outside shifting in the breeze, the high moving clouds, throwing geometric shadows through the blinds onto the rumpled sheets. He gathered his mind and his voice from this other place. “Dreaming, I guess,” he said, not sure if it was true. 

“You want that cup of tea now?” 

He fractured his mind off from what was left, and caught Alex’s eye in the door, steeling himself to build it as best he could again from the beginning: “You want to play guitar?”

\---

\--

-

February 1991

III.  

Lockett found him in the back alley trying to throw up for an nth time in order to dislodge the thing with teeth rooting around in his throat and underneath his chin for buried gold or truffles. Graeme could hear who it was from the cadence of the steps echoing between the mossy brick wall in the rear of the Den and the north edge of the garage next door. “Breathe,” Lockett said, touching his back between the shoulderblades, “Are you with me?” 

“I’m here,” Graeme croaked, throat acid-raw. “Here.” 

“Alex is looking for you,” said Lockett apologetically. 

Graeme pressed his forehead against the cold brick again and groaned. It was raining. Inside in ten minutes they were supposed to play their first set since October. Listening into the wind-sound and the hum of the interstate traffic he thought he could hear Mercedes checking the spells on her bass with the riff from one of the new songs. 

“It’ll be over in half an hour,” Lockett said. He leant against the wall beside Graeme and unearthed a squashed cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. “Over and done. Proved like a loaf of bread.” 

“Are you high?” 

“Obviously…” 

Lockett’s lighter clicked and flared and illuminated his face in a wash of golden light and deep black shadow like a camp counselor telling a ghost story with a flashlight. “Did you take your pills today,” Graeme asked him, standing. When Lockett just looked at him without responding but for an expression implying he should consider the obvious Graeme said, “Well do you have another cigarette.” 

“Think so. Hold these for me…” 

In the pocket inside the leather jacket, produced in the search and passed into Graeme’s open hands, were two syringes in plastic wrapping, a sprig of fresh lavender, lined paper folded so tightly so long ago it was completely flat and curved in the shape of Lockett’s chest, a newspaper cutting in similar condition, a ticket stub from a Mudhoney gig, finally a loose Marlboro, in even worse shape than the one Lockett was smoking. “It’ll do,” Graeme said, though it looked like a joint rolled by a six year old and stepped on repeatedly. 

“They’re really old,” Lockett warned him, as though this weren’t obvious. He piled everything back in the pocket, careful with the lavender sprig, and passed Graeme his lighter. “Maybe they were Bill’s. They taste like they were buried in a tomb with the ancients.” 

They tasted worse than this if such a thing was possible. The acrid smoke scorched Graeme’s throat out and fumigated the thing with teeth back into wherever it was usually hiding. “How did you find me?” he asked Lockett. 

“I felt you suffering.” 

Graeme tried to discern if he was joking but couldn’t tell from the expression, which was deadly serious. He shivered. “Come on,” he said. 

“I scried in your beer. Which I wouldn’t drink any more of when you go back inside, by the way…” 

“Why not?” 

“Just because you shouldn’t and I wouldn’t if I were you. Plus you left it out, and open, I mean, common sense.” He spat against the asphalt in attempt to rid some of the taste of the cigarette. “What songs are you going to play?” 

“The half of the record that we can do. And some new ones.” 

“New ones.” 

“Yeah, I was telling you…” 

“Right,” Lockett lied. His memory wasn’t great, for numerous reasons, which they didn’t speak about. To wit, though they had talked about this relatively extensively while drinking tea and listening to Joni Mitchell in Lockett’s room not three weeks previous, he asked, “What are they like?” 

Graeme pinched the bridge of his nose. Close up the smell of the cigarette was vaguely geriatric and chemical, like mothballs or a palliative care facility, a not dissimilar smell sometimes than seemed to rise like haze from the back of Lockett’s neck and his clothing when Graeme would pick him up on the full moon mornings at the Registry. He would always come out last — sometimes hours after sunrise — so that the nurses could thoroughly bind all his wounds in gauze and tape the gauze with plastic against disease transmission, looking both relieved and disappointed at the sight of Graeme. “They sound really fucking good, Lockett,” he said. 

Lockett’s bent up knee bumped his. “Why are you out here puking then.” 

“Why do you think?” 

“I thought this was what he — ”

“It is but — it’s so hard, and something’s missing — ”

“So are you doing it for yourselves, because you really want to, or because it was his wishes or whatever.” 

He knew that the others had all come to some separate peace about their place in the band now and the meaning of the songs. In the rehearsal space he zoned out the others’ conversation when it became unbearable and focused on his parts to the extent that sometimes he could hardly hear their voices beyond the tones of Alex’s vocal. In the evenings she sat with Graeme on the couch in the house on Thirteenth Avenue until dawn working out the new songs and rearranging the old. Her guitar playing was necessarily different from Wray’s and colored with an unfamiliar — if not dissimilar — omnipresent shadow; this was complicated by the fact that sometimes she played Wray’s guitar. Graeme played what he felt about it, which Alex sometimes told him was unlistenably painful. 

“I need something to get it out,” he told Lockett, as he had been telling himself when he woke up in the mornings and watched the sun move on the blankets paralyzed for a moment under the weight of everything. 

“Does it have to be this? Does this really work?” 

It was such a shocking question that he couldn’t answer for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “Of course.” 

“You hesitated!” 

“I was — you blindsided me!” 

“Nobody ever asks you what you want,” Lockett said. Because he couldn’t quite look at Graeme he was picking the already-destroyed skin around his nails. “It’s really sad.” 

“This _is_ what I want.” 

“I don’t think you know what you want. Or why you want it. Because you never let yourself really think about it.” 

“I already told you I don’t want to do ayahuasca with you, Lockett.” 

“Fuck off, I’m serious.” Indeed, a powerfully intimidating sincerity not far from that heartbroken look from Volunteer Park months previous was circling in Lockett’s dark eyes — like this was the thing that came for the blood before the sharks. “You have to really want this. Like you have to want it for yourself in the core of your soul. You have to need it for yourself. You deserve to need something for yourself.” 

Graeme pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes in attempt to stop crying before he even started and in process nearly singed his eyebrow off with the ember of the shitty cigarette. 

“It isn’t worth it,” Lockett continued. His voice was very close and his breath which was warm and hinted probably he’d drank some of Graeme’s beer whilst scrying in it. “It’s so not worth it that maybe it’ll kill you.” 

“How do you know — ” 

“I mean, it killed me, however many times, and another, you know, the last one, hovering… You don’t have to do that, I don’t care if you cry in front of me.” 

Graeme crossed his arms over his chest in attempt at emphasis. The pressure and salt had distorted his vision such that Lockett’s face was smeared against the blood-black brick and the rain. “I’m not crying,” he said. 

“Whatever.” Lockett dropped the butt of his cigarette; against the wet earth there were no sparks. “It’s okay to leave something that’s hurting you.” 

“What about… obligations, and — ”

“Do you hear yourself? When push comes to shove you have no higher obligation than, like, can you _live_ …” 

The person laughing, Graeme realized, was himself. Not really laughing but just a breath-shaking. “Are you trying to get me to start a band with you?” 

Lockett’s brow twitched, changing his expression like the advance button on a slide projector. “It’s been my sinister plan all along,” he deadpanned. For a second Graeme thought — feared — he might level some other unbearable psychic conundrum, because of the way he had pressed his tooth into the worried blood spot in his lip the way he did when he was trying to keep from saying something. Evidently he decided against it: “I have to go back in before Royce burns the fucking place down,” he said. He rubbed his extinguished cigarette butt out with the toe of his shoe. Graeme could tell by the precise pitch of his furrowed brow that he regretted giving up. “You probably have three more minutes left to think it over before Alex comes out here and drags you inside by your hair.” 

“Right.” 

“Graeme, think about it, okay — ”

“I will.” 

“It’s only because — ”

“I know.” 

“I don’t know that you — well anyway. Maybe see you in three minutes.” 

Graeme watched him go, hunched against the rain. His shadow, a sharp dark form against the buttery streetlight, stretching against the sidewalk at the end of the alley until he turned the corner and it too was gone. From inside he heard the squalling pitch of Alex’s guitar as she charged it up with the spells they’d worked on together on the couch at home. The sound of it was like fingernails up one’s spine if one’s spine were made of slate. It made him imagine what exactly the ramifications would be if he were to get on the last ferry over the sound and walk into the woods and never come out again. 

_Does this really work?_

It didn’t hurt to play guitar these days as he had feared it would. In rehearsal he peeled the fragmented grief-shot memories of October from the Velcro padding keeping them stuck in the locked compartment in the back of his mind and forced them into the instrument. He let go of as much magic as he and his guitar could take and sometimes he felt like he wasn’t there. It gave him a perverse joy to imagine what it might sound like echoing among the mazelike plywood walls of the Den — a feeling which was more of a lack thereof, an open all-over wound, made sound… 

It wasn’t so much that the edge of Wray’s vengeance which had shaped the band out of primordial clay was gone now, but that it was changed, and sometimes too sharp to feel, and the blade circled the entire city and the entire country and the entire world. This blade was heavier than the last and more dangerous, and if they carried it much further they would never be able to put it down again. So there was the choice, not that there was much of a choice: whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows, etc. Whether to go into the woods and never come out again or to spend the rest of his life trying to bleed loud enough to be heard… 

Graeme went out to the street and around the corner and — trying with middling success to ignore the gaggle of eyes which followed him — touched the graffiti under the window to show the doorknob, and slipped inside through the heavy door. Marsden’s drums were shaking the thin plywood walls in a rhythmic knocking like hell’s armies at the gate. Like Graeme’s heartbeat in his ears. The crowd was so thick that it spilled from the open threshold into the main room, shifting like quicksand or lava, roaring with laughter even above the band’s soundcheck, and Graeme shoved through it toward the red light, jostling beers, trampling feet, pulling himself toward the stage with whatever handholds (shoulders, bag straps, belt loops) were readily available, suddenly manic with terror it would be too late, as though by the time he got there, if he ever got there, because it seemed to be pulling further and further away, like a ship having departed, drifting from the dock into infinity, they would have given up, or they would have finished playing, or they would have replaced him… 

Alex saw him first when he was nearly there and he reached for her desperately through the sea of sweaty bodies; she stepped offstage and stretched for him and grasped his arm between wrist and elbow, pulling him with all her strength through the last rows. A flicker of relief undercut her expression of grim determination. Screaming feedback around her waist, slung low on its embroidered leather strap, was Wray’s off-white guitar. 

He stepped up and into the spreading wash of red light and found his instrument, which Alex had plugged in and propped against his amp where it might make the most noise without his touching it. In his hands it was already alive. From the front row the crowd of friends and familiars had seemingly begun to understand that the Crucia set might actually happen. Sitting perched like a bat or some other wide-eyed desert nocturne on a Marshall cabinet in the corner was Lockett, who alone looked like he had known it would. 

Marsden met Graeme’s eyes, seeking a signal, and cracked the snare like fireworks. Across the stage Mercedes had begun to loop the simple slow steps at the root of the bass intro to a new song called “Grave Dirt.” Graeme tried a few chords on the guitar. It only needed a little magic to make it more alive, so he took it hardly thinking and hardly trying from the ambient space around them. It was empty to the eye but for the color and texture of the vivid red light and yet it contained enough lingering historical consciousness to manifest something — someone — watching and waiting there, like a fingerprint or a shadow, like the white eye of the moon in the shifting clouds, when he reached out into the sound at the very core of everything. 

_I’ll be in the music with you all the time…_

In the loamy echoing darkness he grasped another hand and pulled it with him through the veil into the living world, into the growing roar. _Ring_ , he thought, or not the word, just the sound, the sound in a sudden chorus of voices inside his mind, _ring, ring, ring —_

The music starts; the story ends.

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> thank you from the core of my soul to [kate](http://ababelofprose.tumblr.com/) and [eve](http://montpahrnah.tumblr.com/)  
> i'm [here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)  
> [some reference points for this story](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/tagged/minuet)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Emotional Labor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17518421) by [peccadilloes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peccadilloes/pseuds/peccadilloes)




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